Handbook on the Politics of Antarctica 1784717673, 9781784717674

Citation preview

HANDBOOK ON THE POLITICS OF ANTARCTICA

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 1

21/12/2016 10:11

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 2

21/12/2016 10:11

Handbook on the Politics of Antarctica

Edited by

Klaus Dodds Professor of Geopolitics, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Alan D. Hemmings Adjunct Associate Professor, Gateway Antarctica Centre for Antarctic Studies and Research, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Peder Roberts Researcher, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 3

21/12/2016 10:11

© Klaus Dodds, Alan D. Hemmings and Peder Roberts 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2016949969 This book is available electronically in the Social and Political Science subject collection DOI 10.4337/9781784717681

ISBN 978 1 78471 767 4 (cased) ISBN 978 1 78471 768 1 (eBook)

02

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 4

21/12/2016 10:11

Contents List of figuresviii List of tablesx List of contributorsxi Forewordxiv Acknowledgementsxvii List of abbreviationsxviii   1 Introduction: the politics of Antarctica Alan D. Hemmings, Klaus Dodds and Peder Roberts

1

PART I  CONCEPTUALIZING ANTARCTICA   2 Fictionalizing Antarctica Elizabeth Leane

21

  3 Three waves of Antarctic imperialism Shirley V. Scott

37

  4

50

Post-­colonial Antarctica Klaus Dodds and Christy Collis

  5 Heroic and post-­colonial Antarctic narratives Nicoletta Brazzelli   6 Antarctica: feminist art practices and disappearing polar landscapes in the age of the Anthropocene Lisa E. Bloom   7 The continent for science Aant Elzinga

69

84 103

  8 Mediating Antarctica in digital culture: politics of representation and visualisation in art and science Juan Francisco Salazar

125

  9 Common interest and common heritage in Antarctica Rüdiger Wolfrum

142

10 Modern explorers Peder Roberts

152

11 Life, ice and ocean: contemporary Antarctic spaces Alessandro Antonello

167

v

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 5

21/12/2016 10:11

vi  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica 12 Selling the south: commercialisation and marketing of Antarctica Hanne Nielsen

183

13 Antarctic geopolitics Klaus Dodds

199

PART II  ACTING IN AND BEYOND ANTARCTICA 14 Establishing open rights in the Antarctic and outer space: Cold War rivalries and geopolitics in the 1950s and 1960s Roger D. Launius

217

15 The originals: the role and influence of the original signatories to the Antarctic Treaty Marcus Haward

232

16 Territorial claims and coastal states Patrizia Vigni and Francesco Francioni

241

17 Antarctica and the United Nations Peter J. Beck

255

18 The EU and the Antarctic: strange bedfellows? Nils Vanstappen and Jan Wouters

269

19 The past in the present: Antarctica in China’s national narrative Anne-­Marie Brady

284

20 A modest but intensifying power? Brazil, the Antarctic Treaty System and Antarctica301 Daniela Portella Sampaio, Ignacio Javier Cardone and Adriana Erthal Abdenur 21 The politics of early exploration Peder Roberts

318

PART III  REGULATING ANTARCTICA 22 Politics and environmental regulation in Antarctica: a historical perspective Adrian Howkins

337

23 Environmental management: the Fildes Peninsula paradigm Christina Braun, Fritz Hertel and Hans-­Ulrich Peter

351

24 The changing face of political engagement in Antarctic tourism Daniela Liggett and Emma Stewart

368

25 Southern Ocean search and rescue: platforms and procedures Julia Jabour

392

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 6

21/12/2016 10:11

Contents  vii 26 CCAMLR: an ecosystem approach to the Southern Ocean in the Anthropocene408 Henrik Österblom and Olof Olsson 27 Fishing the bottom of the Earth: the political challenges of ecosystem-­ based management Cassandra M. Brooks and David G. Ainley

422

28 An icy reception or a warm embrace? The Antarctic Treaty System and the international law of the sea Tim Stephens

439

29 Svalbard and Antarctica: problems and solutions Stuart Kaye

453

30 Antarctic cultural heritage: geopolitics and management Ricardo Roura

468

31 Working geopolitics: sealing, whaling, and industrialized Antarctica Dag Avango

485

PART IV  FUTURES IN ANTARCTICA 32 Antarctic politics in a transforming global geopolitics Alan D. Hemmings

507

33 Antarctic environmental challenges in a global context Steven L. Chown

523

34 Argentine territorial nationalism in the South Atlantic and Antarctica Matthew C. Benwell

540

35 Global legal norms in the Antarctic Ruth Davis

555

36 Contemporary security concerns Elizabeth Nyman

571

37 Contemporary environmental politics and discourse analysis in Antarctica Lize-­Marié van der Watt

584

Index599

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 7

21/12/2016 10:11

Figures   1.1 Antarctica defined by the CCAMLR boundary 5   1.2 Territorial claims 7   6.1 Judit Hersko, Portrait of Anna Schwartz, 2008 87   6.2 Judit Hersko, With Scott at the Pole (collage by Anna Schwartz), 2011 88   6.3 Judit Hersko, Pteropods (from the scientific notebooks of Anna Schwartz), 200890   6.4 Anne Noble, ‘The Barne Glacier, Christchurch Antarctic Centre’, 2001 92   6.5 Anne Noble, ‘Antarctic Storm’, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2002 93   6.6 Anne Noble, ‘Piss Pole #2’, Antarctica, 2008 94   6.7 Connie Samaras, VALIS Dome and Tunnels, 2005 96   6.8 Connie Samaras, VALIS Dome Interior, 2005 97   6.9 Connie Samaras, VALIS Underneath Amundsen–Scott Station, 2005 98 20.1 Percentage of papers proposed by Brazil per meeting 304 20.2 The PROANTAR budget: amounts set by law proposal, executed, and total allocated in 2001–2013 304 23.1 Overview of the Fildes Peninsula and Ardley Island 352 24.1 Number of tourists visiting Antarctica (1965–2016) based on IAATO statistics and a range of sources for data prior to 1991 369 24.2 Total number of Working Papers and Information Papers on tourism issues submitted to ATCMs and ATMEs over the last fifty years 377 24.3 Number of tourism Working Papers vs. total number of Working Papers submitted to ATCMs over time  378 24.4 Number of tourism Information Papers vs. total number of Information Papers submitted to ATCMs over time 379 24.5 ATCM regulatory mechanisms, tourism regulatory mechanisms and tourism Working Papers 381 24.6 Information Papers by IAATO and ASOC 385 25.1 Southern Ocean SAR areas of responsibility 395 27.1 CCAMLR management areas and Total Allowable Catch (TAC) for toothfish and krill 425 27.2 Boundaries of historic Antarctic claims and CCAMLR marine protected areas430 31.1 Sites with remains from the sealing industry at South Georgia, most (but not all) of them in relatively well-­protected locations, in beach areas with large populations of seals 488 31.2 Sealer graves at Prince Olav Harbour – one of the few material legacies of the sealing industry that is visible today 489  viii

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 8

21/12/2016 10:11

Figures  ix 31.3 Whaling stations at South Georgia. Just as the sealers before them, the whaling companies established their stations close to well-­protected harbors, but only on the north coast, where rich hunting grounds lay adjacent to the Antarctic convergence 491 31.4 The production area at Prince Olav Harbour whaling station at South Georgia494 34.1 ‘Malvinas: a cause present in every corner of the homeland’ 545

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 9

21/12/2016 10:11

Tables   7.1 Three different concepts of internationalism 110 24.1 Topics addressed in ATCM/ATME papers on tourism between 1966 and 2014382 24.2 Topics addressed by regulatory mechanisms adopted in ATCMs over the last fifty years 382 24.3 Tourism-­focussed papers submitted to ATCMs and ATMEs between 1966 and 2014 by (co-­) authoring Parties relative to the total number of papers these Parties (co-­) submitted 383 24.4 Summary of tourism-­focussed papers submitted to ATCMs and ATMEs between 1966 and 2014 by groups of Parties sharing specific characteristics relative to the total number of papers these submitted by these fractions 384 24.5 Information Papers by IAATO and ASOC by topic and authorship 386 24.6 Most frequent coalitions on Working Papers 387 33.1 Challenges to the conservation of the Antarctic within the next decade, and over fifty years 528 33.2 Conservation challenges currently identified as significant for the Antarctic region compared with the priorities of the Committee for Environmental Protection, and key focal areas of CCAMLR 530

x

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 10

21/12/2016 10:11

Contributors Adriana Erthal Abdenur is Professor at the Institute of International Relations of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. David G. Ainley is with H.T. Harvey and Associates, Los Gatos, California, United States of America. Alessandro Antonello is a McKenzie Post-­Doctoral Fellow at the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia. Dag Avango is a Researcher in the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Peter J. Beck is Emeritus Professor of International History in the School of Economics,  History and Politics at Kingston University, Kingston upon Thames, United Kingdom. Matthew C. Benwell is Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University, Newcastle, United Kingdom. Lisa E. Bloom is a Research Associate at the University of California at Los Angeles’ Centre for the Study of Women, Los Angeles, California, United States of America. Anne-­Marie Brady is Professor of Politics at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Christina Braun is with the Polar and Bird Ecology Group, University of Jena, Jena, Germany. Nicoletta Brazzelli is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Milan, Milan, Italy. Cassandra M. Brooks is completing a doctorate in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America. Ignacio Javier Cardone is completing a doctorate at the International Relations Institute of the University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil. Steven L. Chown is Professor and Head of the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Christy Collis is an Associate Professor in the School of Media, Entertainment and Creative Arts, Entertainment and Arts Management at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Ruth Davis is Coordinator of the Masters Program at the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (ANCORS), University of Wollongong. xi

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 11

21/12/2016 10:11

xii  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, United Kingdom. Aant Elzinga is Emeritus Professor in the Theory of Science in the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science at the University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden. Francesco Francioni is Emeritus Professor and Co-­Director of the Academy of European Law at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. Marcus Haward is a Professor and Theme Leader for Ocean and Antarctic Governance at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia. Alan D. Hemmings is a specialist on polar governance based in Perth, Western Australia and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Gateway Antarctica Centre for Antarctic Studies and Research, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Fritz Hertel is based in Dessau-­Roßlau, Germany. Adrian Howkins is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, United States of America. Julia Jabour is Senior Lecturer in Law and Policy at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia. Stuart Kaye is the Director and Professor of Law at the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia. Roger D. Launius is Associate Director, Collections and Curatorial Affairs at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC, United States of America. Elizabeth Leane is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia. Daniela Liggett is a Lecturer at Gateway Antarctica Centre for Antarctic Studies and Research, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Hanne Nielsen is completing a doctorate in the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia. Elizabeth Nyman is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Coordinator Maritime Studies Program, Texas A&M University, Galveston, Texas, United States of America. Olof Olsson is the Managing Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. Henrik Österblom is Theme Leader and Deputy Science Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. Hans-­Ulrich Peter is with the Polar and Bird Ecology Group, University of Jena, Jena, Germany.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 12

21/12/2016 10:11

Contributors  xiii Peder Roberts is a Post-­Doctoral Researcher in the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Ricardo Roura is Coordinator of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition’s Madrid Protocol and Tourism Campaigns; and Advisor to the Antarctic Ocean Alliance Marine Protected Areas campaign. He is based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Juan Francisco Salazar is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Parramatta, Australia. Daniela Portella Sampaio is completing a doctorate at the International Relations Institute at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil and Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, United Kingdom. Shirley V. Scott is a Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Tim Stephens is Professor of International Law, Sydney Law School, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia. Emma Stewart is a senior Lecturer in Tourism and Parks in the Department of Tourism, Sport and Society at Lincoln University, Christchurch, New Zealand. Lize-­Marié van der Watt is a Post-­Doctoral Researcher at the Arctic Research Centre, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden. Nils Vanstappen is completing a doctorate at the Leven Centre for Global Governance Studies, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. Patrizia Vigni is a Professor in the Department of Law at the University of Siena, Siena, Italy. Rüdiger Wolfrum is Emeritus Professor and Managing Director of the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and the Rule of Law in Heidelberg, Germany; and a Judge (and former President) of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. Jan Wouters is Jean Monnet Chair and Professor of International Law and Organizations at the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. Oran R. Young is an Emeritus Professor, Institutional and International Governance, Environmental Institutions at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management,  University of California, Santa Barbara, California, United States of America.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 13

21/12/2016 10:11

Foreword Why should we take an interest in what happens in Antarctica? Oran R. Young

When asked to identify cases of success in the realm of international environmental governance, most of us who think about such things include the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) as one of a handful of cases that together constitute the gold standard in this realm. Signed in December 1959 during the height of the cold war, the Antarctic Treaty not only suspended competition among a number of states regarding jurisdictional claims to slices of Antarctica; it also demilitarized the continent, thereby partially exempting it from the most vigorous and ongoing competition between the superpowers for power and influence in most other parts of the world. The complex regime that has developed on the foundation provided by the initial treaty, has proven resilient, responding to various pressures for change by adding substantive components as needed (for example, the 1980 Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, the 1991 Environmental Protocol) and finding new ways to interpret important provisions (for example, the criteria for granting additional signatories to the Antarctic Treaty the status of Contracting Party) to adjust to changing realities in international society. There are not many other international governance systems that can match the ATS’s record of effectiveness over a long period of time. Needless to say, the ATS is not perfect. Critics can and do point to a variety of shortcomings. A number of parties have made use of military personnel and equipment in the construction and supply of research stations and in the deployment of scientists and scientific instruments to research sites. This challenges the claims made by ATS devotees who claim that the continent is free from taint of militarism. The so-­called claimant states have not abandoned their jurisdictional ambitions, as exemplified by various statements regarding jurisdiction over the seabed/continental shelf in waters adjacent to Antarctica’s coasts. In March 2016, Argentina and the UK resurrected their smoldering territorial conflicts in the South Atlantic and Antarctica, in the aftermath of claims that Argentina’s sovereign rights to the seabed included the Falkland Islands and South Georgia. The recommendations by a little known UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf became headline news around the world for a week or so. In reality the Commission did not ‘recommend’ that Argentina’s sovereign rights extended over the  continental shelf adjacent to the Falkland Islands/Malvinas. Thinly disguised economic and ­political motivations underlie decisions about the location and the scale of some of the scientific research stations. Others have pointed to those responsible for the operation of the research stations and argued that they have not always adhered to high standards of environmental protection in disposing of wastes and obsolete equipment. In the process, the gloss of science and the overall scientific prestige to the workings of the ATS have been diminished. There is some gap between the ideal and the actual in the operation of xiv

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 14

21/12/2016 10:11

Foreword  xv every governance system. And the fact remains that the ATS has proven successful with regard to its fundamental goals of peace, scientific co-­operation, resource management and international goodwill. Antarctica remains a peaceful continent with human activities taking place under a well-­developed regulatory framework. Like any successful governance system, the ATS has shown some capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. It could be argued that the ATS has endured precisely because it has not altered and adapted as much as might have been expected, especially after the entry into force of the Protocol on Environmental Protection in 1998. Perhaps the most fundamental and ultimately the most significant development in the life of this governance system remains the abandonment of the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities (CRAMRA) adopted in 1988 following extensive negotiations and the adoption of the Environmental Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty in 1991 following comparatively brief negotiations. CRAMRA, which failed to enter into force as a component of the ATS, would have allowed economic development in Antarctica under the terms of a highly innovative regulatory system involving, among other things, the allocation of some of the proceeds from any mining occurring in Antarctica to cover the costs of administering the governance system. The Environmental Protocol, by contrast, begins by stating in Article 2 that the Parties ‘hereby designate Antarctica as a natural reserve, devoted to peace and science.’ It then proceeds in Article 7 to state clearly and succinctly that ‘[a]ny activity relating to mineral resources, other than scientific research, shall be prohibited.’ What we see here is not only a shift from one laboriously negotiated treaty text to another, but also a transformative switch from one underlying discourse to another. CRAMRA is rooted in the discourse of conservation, a way of thinking that sanctions the consumptive use of natural resources, albeit in this case under a regulatory regime that would have imposed unusually strict limitations on those engaged in extractive activities. The Environmental Protocol, by contrast, reflects a preservationist discourse, a way of thinking that rejects the consumptive uses of natural resources such as oil, gas, coal, and minerals. But it is important to be clear that science is not an end in itself in this context. It is an instrument to be used on the part of those seeking to ensure that Antarctica remains a ‘natural reserve’ that does not become a locus for the pursuit of economic and political objectives of the sort that underlie human activities in most parts of the world. Arguably the preservationist ethic of the 1990s has been eroded and it would not be questionable to claim that the Protocol led to a water-­shed change in the governance of Antarctica. There are some worrying signs – the sorts of ideas and practices associated with liability, environmental impact assessment and limited commercialization have by and large tilted away from the formal content and spirit of the Protocol. But will this switch prove sustainable under the circumstances likely to unfold at the global level during the coming decades. Contemplating both the challenge of feeding a human population of more than 10 billion people and the consequences of expected geopolitical shifts in international society, some analysts have come to the conclusion that the preservationist vision embedded in the Environmental Protocol cannot survive, even to the end of the current ban on mineral activity in 2049. The consumptive juggernaut of industrialized and industrializing societies, they assert, will simply overwhelm the preservationist arrangement adopted in 1991. Others, pointing to the probable impacts of climate change in the south polar region, argue that Antarctica is likely to experience profound biophysical change over the coming decades that will overwhelm the arrangements embedded in the ATS.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 15

21/12/2016 10:11

xvi  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Under the circumstances, it may become increasingly difficult to know what it means for the continent to be ‘devoted to peace and science’ on a lasting basis. Still, it is important not to be swept away by the assumption that structural and material forces will inevitably undermine the preservationist discourse underlying the Environmental Protocol. The fundamental issue here concerns the normative discourses underlying governance systems and the principles that will guide human/nature relations as we move deeper into the Anthropocene. Are we doomed to a world in which the ­pressures of population growth, industrialization, and rampant consumerism continue to grow unchecked, producing a situation in which we ransack even the most remote areas of the planet for the resources needed to support this materialistic way of life on a continuing basis? Or is there a prospect that shocks arising from transgressing ‘planetary boundaries’ will set in motion fundamental changes in the normative discourses we employ to think about human development and about the place of human societies within the Earth System? Might we succeed in moving toward a new discourse of stewardship that would place bounds on consumptive uses of natural resources, without prohibiting such uses altogether? Of course, we cannot answer these questions at this juncture. But there are good reasons to believe that an effort to grapple with such concerns will come to occupy a central place in debates about the role of human actions as driving forces in the Earth System during the decades to come. Antarctica along with other previously remote areas such as the deep seabed and outer space is playing a central role in these debates. With the ending of remoteness, it is no longer appropriate to dismiss what happens in a place like Antarctica as having little to teach us about the broader issues. It may, in fact, prove easier to sort out the pros and cons of new ways to organize our thinking about human/environment interactions in situations that are comparatively simple and that allow us to focus on the core issues without the distractions that cloud our thinking regarding more mainstream concerns. Naturally, any insights we are able to derive from this process would require translation to make them applicable to mainstream debates occurring in both domestic and international settings. Looked at in this way, it is easy to grasp why we should take an interest in what happens in Antarctica. But as this Handbook makes abundantly clear, that opportunity is slipping away.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 16

21/12/2016 10:11

Acknowledgements A volume of 37 chapters, involving 44 contributors, takes time and patience from all involved. So a first thank you goes to all our contributors, for the positive, collegial and enthusiastic engagement that this project has revealed. As editors we are also immensely grateful that the doyen of polar studies, Oran Young, was indeed kind enough to provide the Foreword to the volume. At Edward Elgar Publishing, we thank our enthusiastic, professional editors: Chloe Mitchell and Jane Bayliss, alongside Alex O’Connell acting as our commissioning editor. Klaus Dodds offers thanks to his colleagues and students on the MSc. Geopolitics and Security at Royal Holloway, University of London for their support and interest in the geopolitics of Antarctica. Long-­term collaboration and friendship with his fellow editors has greatly enabled the finalization of this volume. Alan Hemmings thanks colleagues on national and expert delegations to the meetings of the Antarctic Treaty System, and the staff of the Antarctic Treaty and CCAMLR secretariats, for insights into the practical politics of this system over three decades; discussions within the emerging Antarctic community of humanities and social science scholars, including SCAR’s Humanities and Social Sciences Expert Group and History Expert Group, whose joint meetings are a fruitful environment for new Antarctic t­ hinking, and whose existence within SCAR promises a bridge across intellectual disciplines concerned with Antarctica. He records particular thanks to Chris Hemmings, for her untiring support and interest. Peder Roberts extends thanks to colleagues within the SCAR History Expert Group, the SCAR Humanities and Social Sciences Expert Group, the History of Norwegian Polar Politics project, and the Polar Geopolitics seminar series, for their stimulating and always friendly collaboration over the years.

xvii

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 17

21/12/2016 10:11

Abbreviations AAE Australasian Antarctic Expedition AAT Australian Antarctic Territory ABNJ area beyond national jurisdiction ACAP Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels ACBR Antarctic Conservation Biogeographic Region ACTM Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting AFoPS Asian Forum for Polar Science AIS automatic identification system AISS Antarctic Integrated System Science AMCAFF Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora Antarctic Ocean Alliance ASMA Antarctic Specially Managed Area ASOC Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition ASPA Antarctic Specially Protected Area AT Antarctic Treaty ATCM Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting ATME Antarctic Treaty Meeting of Experts ATS Antarctic Treaty System BANZARE British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expeditions BAS British Antarctic Survey BEAM Baltic Ecosystem Adaptive Management BIOMASS Biological Investigations of Marine Antarctic Systems and Stocks CARICOM Caribbean Community and Common Market CBD Convention on Biological Diversity CCAMLR Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources CCAS Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals CCP Chinese Communist Party CEE Comprehensive Environmental Evaluation CELAC Community of Latin American and Caribbean States CEMP CCAMLR Ecosystem Monitoring Program CEP Committee for Environmental Protection CIRM Inter-­Ministerial Commission for Sea Resources (Brazil) CLCS Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf CNPq National Council for Scientific and Technologic Development (Brazil) COLTO The Coalition of Legal Toothfish Operators CONANTAR National Commission for Antarctic Matters (Brazil) CONAPA Comite Nacional de Pesquisas Antarticas (National Committee for Antarctic Research (Brazil)) COP Conference of Parties (2015 Paris COP meeting) xviii

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 18

21/12/2016 10:11

Abbreviations  xix CPs Consultative Parties CRAMRA Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities CTAE Commonwealth Trans-­Antarctic Expedition (Fuchs and Hillary) DROMLAN Dronning Maud Land Air Network EAIS East Antarctic Ice Sheet EARSMPA East Antarctic Representative System of Marine Protected Areas EBM ecosystem-­based management EEZs exclusive economic zones EIA Environmental Impact Assessment EIES Electronic Information Exchange System ENGO environmental non-­governmental organization EPICA European project for deep ice core drilling in Antarctica ESF European Science Foundation ESG Escola Superior de Guerra (Brazilian War College) EU Euroean Union FAO Food and Agriculture Organisation FIDS Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey FIG Falkland Islands Government FPAI Fildes Peninsula and Ardley Island HSM Historic Site and Monument IAATO The International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators IANTAR Brazilian Antarctic Institute (Brazil) IBEA Brazilian Institute for Antarctic Research ICRW International Convention on the Regulation on Whaling ICSU International Council of Scientific Unions IESS Integrated Earth Systems Science IGBP International Geosphere-­Biosphere Programme IGY International Geophysical Year IHO International Hydrographic Organisation IMO International Maritime Organization IPC International Polar Committee IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPY International Polar Year ISA International Seabed Authority IUCN International Union of the Conservation of Nature IUU illegal, unreported and unregulated (fisheries) IWC International Whaling Commission LOSC Law of the Sea Convention MERCOSUR Southern Common Market MPA marine protected area MRCC Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre MRE Ministry of External Relations (Brazil) MSC Marine Stewardship Council MSY maximum sustainable yield NAE National Antarctic Expedition

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 19

21/12/2016 10:11

xx  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica NAM Non-­Aligned Movement NAP National Antarctic Programme NAVAREA the geographic area in which various governments are responsible for navigation and weather warnings NERC Natural Environment Research Council NIEO New International Economic Order OCS outer continental shelves OECS Organization of Eastern Caribbean States POLANTAR National Policy for Antarctic Matters (Brazil) PRC People’s Republic of China PRIC Polar Research Institute of China PROANTAR Programa Antártico Brasileiro (Brazilian Antarctic Programme) RAPAL Meeting of National Administrators of Latin American Antarctic Programmes RFMO Regional Fisheries Management Organisation RGA Royal Geographical Society ROC Republic of China SANAE South Africa’s first National Antarctic Expedition SAR International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue (SAR Convention) SCAR Scientific Commission on Antarctic Research SCATS Standing Committee on the Antarctic Treaty System SC-­CCAMLR Scientific Committee of the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources SCI Science in Antarctica SGHT South Georgia Heritage Trust SGSSI South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands SOLAS International Convention for Safety of Life at Sea SSSI Site of Special Scientific Importance TAC Total Allowable Catch UAV Unmanned Aerial Vehicles UN United Nations UNCLOS United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea UNDP United Nations Development Program UNEP United Nations Environment Program UNFCCC United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change UNFSA United Nations Fish Stock Agreement UNSG United Nations Secretary-­General VALIS vast active living intelligence system VMS vessel monitoring system VUWAE Victoria University of Wellington Antarctic Expedition WAIS West Antarctic Ice Sheet WCED World Commission on Environment and Development (UN) WCRP World Climate Research Programme WMO World Meteorological Organisation WSSD World Summit on Sustainable Development

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 20

21/12/2016 10:11

1.  Introduction: the politics of Antarctica

Alan D. Hemmings, Klaus Dodds and Peder Roberts

‘WINDS OF CHANGE’? POLITICS AND ANTARCTICA Many people assume that the Antarctic represents a complete escape from politics – a realm of pure natural spectacle, trammeled only by a small band of altruistic scientists.1

For a continent that is often regarded as essentially separate from the global political and economic system, Antarctica has a complex and interesting political history. The Antarctic Treaty (adopted in 1959, and entering into force in 1961)2 is the best-­known but by no means the only political agreement to impact the continent. At the same time, many of the currents that washed against and across lands around the rest of the globe also reached the Antarctic. The aim of this book is to show some of the myriad ways in which the continent for science and peace is also a continent created by politics, maintained by politics – and indeed, generating politics. In 1948, the American explorer and scientist Laurence Gould could write in an essay entitled ‘Strategy and politics in the polar areas’ that, ‘Politics in the polar regions are still largely concerned with political claims and their maintenance’.3 While his article was mainly concerned with Antarctica, it drew attention to the wider nature of claim making in areas considered too remote and too under-­populated for the kinds of colonial settlement that was common to regions such as southern Argentina and Chile, the Falklands/ Malvinas, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. In these more northerly latitudes, land was appropriated, settled and administered. Where there was ‘maintenance’, it came largely in the form of importing practices already pioneered elsewhere – of disempowering indigenous communities, establishing property regimes, building fences and hedges and managing new environments. For territories that lacked indigenous populations and held little prospect of permanent settlement, resource harvesting and territorial claiming were ends as well as means. By the time Gould penned his article, the politics of the Antarctic was a very ­different affair to one say of 1908 let alone 1808. The burst of sealing around the Antarctic Peninsula during the early nineteenth century made it rare to see even a single fur seal in South Georgia by the turn of the twentieth century. Yet few (quite possibly none) of these sealers regarded themselves as pioneers after whom others would follow. Claiming and regulating Antarctic space came first in the early twentieth century, when a new resource boom – this time in whaling – led Britain to claim the Falkland Islands Dependencies (now known as the British Antarctic Territory and the separate South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands) in 1908. By 1946 six other states had registered claims (Australia, Argentina, Chile, France, New Zealand and Norway). Like his mentor Richard E. Byrd, Gould was a passionate advocate of an American Antarctic claim, owing to the country’s extensive involvement in exploration, exploitation and science, but the United States and its fellow post-­war superpower, the Soviet Union, resisted such 1

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 1

21/12/2016 10:11

2  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica apparent temptation to lay claim to the world’s only uninhabited continent (at least in terms of human beings). Gould’s America nevertheless left its mark on Antarctica. Shortly after his article appeared, the United States circulated a proposal for a condominium of eight states (the United States and the seven claimants) that would collectively govern the Antarctic.4 It seems remarkable now that, even at the time, such a restrictive community could be seen as providing a plausible basis for managing Antarctica – without the Soviet Union in particular, and with Germany and Japan sidelined as a consequence of World War II. Although that particular proposal came to naught, the subsequent Eisenhower ­government played a decisive role first in organizing the 1957–58 International Geophysical Year (IGY) – which included an Antarctic program involving twelve states – and then in bringing together those same twelve states to create the Antarctic Treaty.5 Remarkably, there was very little challenge to the decision of the United States to invite only eleven other participants to determine the political framework for an entire continent. Such a proposition would be unthinkable today. Despite its well-­earned status as a decisive event in Antarctic political history, the Treaty did not render previous political issues moot. Nor did it close the door to a range of subsequent political developments that have both reflected and challenged the Treaty. In this volume we have adopted a very broad interpretation of ‘politics’, both in relation to the subjects covered and the disciplinary orientation of our multiple contributors. This handbook is not in any sense restricted to the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS)6 and its formal governance per se. The contributors do not treat the Antarctic as ‘a pole apart’; rather, they explore how the politics of Antarctica works through and across a range of scales from the everyday, the local, the national, the circumpolar and the global. The Antarctic is, in our estimation, unavoidably a political arena in relation to all activities on and off the ice, rock, air and waters that are assumed to materially compose Antarctica. We are also suspicious of over-­determining the notion that the Antarctic continent and surrounding islands south of latitude 60º South (the area of application for the Antarctic Treaty) constitute a unique and privileged reference point. While the Antarctic Treaty Area (ATA) is clearly significant, it is so because under contemporary international law no part of Antarctica is generally recognized as the territory of any state. This reality has required that both contracting parties to the Antarctic Treaty (including the claimant states) and other states with an interest in the region treat the ATA as an important and distinct field of operation.7 The negotiators of the Antarctic Treaty created a system that has since demonstrated the flexibility to adopt a range of administrative and management tools – notably regarding environmental regulation – that affect the ATA and beyond, and have often been products of political concerns originating far from the poles. Our approach as editors supports our earlier works addressing the Antarctic, on the one hand resisting the appeals of the exceptional and on the other hand not reproducing a particular (invariably uncritical) political–scientific story of Antarctic politics grounded in the geopolitical and institutional circumstances of the IGY, Antarctic Treaty and the Cold War.8 We hope that the juxtaposition of analyses by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds introduces vitality into the debates around Antarctic politics. Since the ‘continent for science’ rubric became established in the 1950s, there has been a degree of intellectual capture of the idea of Antarctica’s governance as necessarily a ‘scientific’ question, or at least of the idea that scientists are peculiarly well positioned to offer insight

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 2

21/12/2016 10:11

Introduction: the politics of Antarctica  3 into both what kind of place Antarctica is and how it ought to be administered. Scientists were clearly essential in helping to expand knowledge regarding, inter alia, marine biodiversity, what lay beneath the polar ice cap, and how the air and water currents of the Antarctic related to planetary systems as a whole. Such knowledge was useful politically as well, as sponsoring institutions and their paymasters (usually states) were able to earn intellectual, economic and political capital from those achievements and ambitions. Prestige, money and influence were produced through this scientific labour. The ATS entrenched science as the dominant currency within the political economy of Antarctica, and political practice itself could (and did) place a further premium on acquiring ever more knowledge about the region and its non-­human inhabitants. The intellectual and political dominance of science and scientists was written into the DNA of the ATS. Initially this arrangement met with very little contestation and considerable praise. This was to change, dramatically so, during the 1970s and 1980s. There are a number of vectors we could identify as significant. As the Antarctic attracted ever-­ greater attention from international observers, including non-­governmental organizations Greenpeace and the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, questions began to be asked about the modus operandi of the ATS. It was, for critics, too secretive, too insulated and too isolated from mainstream scrutiny.9 As future Antarctic mining became an increasingly acute question during the 1980s, a range of actors from states to NGOs and concerned individuals worried that the imprimatur of a technical–scientific elite would serve to justify preserving a status quo that restricted access to the continent’s resources to the states that dominated within the ATS. The most significant of these developments came from a group of states that articulated a form of post-­colonial opposition to both the appropriation of Antarctica and the secretive workings of the ATS. Led by a former British colony, Malaysia, members of the global South urged the UN Secretary-­General to consider the ‘Question of Antarctica’. As Peter Beck has recorded over the decades, this challenge provided a fascinating insight into how the politics of Antarctica was framed, negotiated and managed. The Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties appointed Australia (itself a settler-­colonial state) to ­co-­ordinate its UN relationship with a growing number of states that were unhappy with the political management of Antarctica, or at least unhappy with a lack of transparency regarding the ATS. It would be no exaggeration to say that the 1980s represented a ‘crisis of legitimacy’ for the ATS – to use the term earlier coined by the German academic Jürgen Habermas in 1973.10 The governance regime endured, but it was seen by many in the wider international community to have lost its legitimacy. With prominent members such as apartheid South Africa and a club-­like status that seemed to privilege states from the golden age of European imperialism (or their settler-­colonial offspring), the ATS could easily appear indifferent to the ‘wind of change’ that British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had in 1960 famously described as swirling through the colonized world.11 Antarctic politics was becoming more complicated in other ways that did not so obviously reflect the processes of exercising state power. Within the academy, historians of science and political scientists were increasingly sceptical of the claims made by those who wished to preserve the framing of Antarctica as a ‘continent by and for science’.12 Scholars such as Aant Elzinga made the important observation that science in Antarctica was a product of (as much as an exception to) geopolitical considerations and rivalries. The ATS made science an instrument of politics rather than an alternative to it. Politics

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 3

21/12/2016 10:11

4  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica was to be found everywhere in Antarctica and beyond, ranging from the decision to build a research station to the chairing of a scientific committee far removed from the polar continent and surrounding seas. From the 1990s feminist scholars such as Lisa Bloom, Christy Collis, Elena Glasberg and Victoria Rosner published a series of powerful counter-­punctual interventions, which called into question how the politics of Antarctica was shot through with gendered, racialized, nationalized and sexualized imaginaries and practices.13 Bloom’s Gender on the Ice, published in 1993, first brought to the fore quite how dominant white men hailing from Euro-­American/Anglophonic worlds had been in shaping the political and ethical possibilities for Antarctica.14 This scholarship and praxis was particularly critical of the maintenance and consolidation of imperial masculinities, and the manner in which women, people of colour and communities hailing from the Global South in particular have been marginalized, excluded or simply forgotten about in favour of narratives and ideologies that privilege a particular minority and their world-­views. Elzinga, Bloom and many others have laid the foundations for a flourishing new body of critical scholarship on Antarctic politics. Drawing inspiration from critical human geography/critical geopolitics, intellectual history, environmental history, history of science and critical pubic international law, this body of work has revisited pivotal moments in the ATS story such as the IGY and Antarctic Treaty negotiations, and unsettled dominant narratives that tended to coalesce around national achievement, rational enlightenment and scientific curiosity. The Antarctic Treaty should be seen for what it was and is; an attempt by a privileged group of nation-­states to create a system of governance informed by their interests and wishes, and empowered by a belief and investment in Western science and modernity more generally. Environmental historians such as Adrian Howkins have done important work in pointing out the paradoxical role of the polar regions in global imaginaries – both as some of the most protected parts of the planet (through legal instruments such as the 1992 Protocol on Environment Protection to the Antarctic Treaty – the Madrid Protocol)15 and as places heavily exploited, polluted and degraded by human actions in the ground, over the ice and under the water.16 Nowhere is this clearer than in the possible collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) in the face of anthropogenic climate change – an event that will have significant repercussions for the globe as a whole.17

BOUNDING AND UNBOUNDING ANTARCTICA With Antarctica, as with most other places, we think it is unhelpful to be too prescriptive in setting geographical, intellectual and political boundaries. Taking inspiration from the late Doreen Massey, it is more productive to think about how places are made and remade.18 Indeed, the dominant Antarctic political regime, while plainly a regional regime, has participants (and consequences) distributed globally. The ATS has a dual identity as a regional and global construct – just one of its many peculiarities. But geographically, if we accept the Treaty Area as a dominant framing, we are encouraged to think, act and talk about the region comprising the Antarctic continent, peri-­Antarctic islands and waters south of 60º South latitude (S.) – this whole area being the area of application of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, the 1972 Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals,19 and the

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 4

21/12/2016 10:11

Introduction: the politics of Antarctica  5 1991 Madrid Protocol –plus the waters between 60º S. and the Antarctic Convergence or Polar Front: the area of application of the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).20 An approximation to the position of the Polar Front (the actual position of which may now be affected by climate change) is offered by the northern boundary defined for CCAMLR, with a boundary set at 60º S. in the South Pacific sector, 50º S. in the South Atlantic and eastern South Pacific sectors, and 45º S. in the western South Pacific sector (see Figure 1.1). The map itself is worth a second glance. For polar scholars it is so often reproduced that we simply take it for granted, and implicitly we have played a part in reinforcing as a central achievement of the ATS its construction of space below a particular line of

Source:  Alan D. Hemmings.

Figure 1.1  Antarctica defined by the CCAMLR boundary

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 5

21/12/2016 10:11

6  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica l­atitude. The map is central to how we imagine and practise Antarctic space. It ensures that the dynamism, instability – indeed, the very aliveness – of Antarctica is flattened for the purpose of representation and by extension, of control. Something that was not unique to the southern latitudes, as historians of tropical and temperate imperial territories and empires have noted elsewhere.21 In her classic work For Space, Massey asks readers to think about space as three things: as something composed through interactions ranging from the molecular to the global; as something defined by multiple possibilities; and finally as something always in the process of being made and remade.22 The importance of the last point rests in its pointing to a more hopeful politics of space, one attuned to the possibility of openness and alternative configurations. What the map cannot help us with are Massey’s other major points about spatial ­politics – the thrown-­togetherness of place and the power-­geometries of place. In the first instance, Massey’s point about objects such as maps is that they fail to capture the way in which places are intensely material, bringing together the social-­political with the physical. The movements of pathogens, pollutants and people alongside the migratory cycles of whales and birds provide powerful reminders that the boundaries used to define ‘Antarctica’ are not hard, but both flexible and stretchable. There are limits to the scale and extent of human (and indeed humane) governance, as states argue with one another about the rights and wrongs of ‘scientific whaling’, marine protected areas, environmental impact assessments, tourism, and illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing. Massey’s point about power-­geometries highlighted an important aspect of processes such as globalization in terms of inequality and division. Put in a polar context, we might talk about power-­geometries, which appear rooted in history and territory as well as mobility and flow. States such as Australia, France, Norway, New Zealand and the UK retain significant influence within the ATS thanks in part to their colonial-­era annexations, including continued sovereignty over sub-­Antarctic islands. Located throughout the Southern Ocean, these islands provide a further complication to the dominant geopolitical architecture of the region through their status as national outposts proximate to a nominally international space. Included within the CCAMLR area, they differ significantly in their status from land and ice shelves south of 60º South,23 which is subject to the Antarctic Treaty and whose territorial status is reserved under its Article IV. The space south of the Polar Front is, for the overwhelming majority of the world’s states (if plainly not for claimant states – see Figure 1.2) an area beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ). It is this peculiar and huge global space that forms the conception of ‘Antarctica’ used in this volume, but it is one that we should not assume is fixed by ice, water and rock and thus incapable of being imagined in other ways. Indeed, simply to imagine this space as ABNJ is to make a certain set of assumptions rooted in existing concepts of law, politics and community. The regional system of the ATS is far from the only body of applicable international law. Global instruments such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)24 and the Convention on Biological Diversity;25 global institutions such as the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea, the International Seabed Authority, the ever-­controversial International Whaling Commission, among others; all these and more are significant (or potentially significant) players in this Antarctica. So too are the domestic legal codes and practices of the now more than 50 states that actually operate in the Antarctic under one or more of its instruments – and those of other states active there which are not parties to any of the

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 6

21/12/2016 10:11

Introduction: the politics of Antarctica  7

Source:

Source:  Alan D. Hemmings.

Figure 1.2  Territorial claims instruments. But it is the ATS that has provided (and to a considerable extent still provides) the central ‘glue’ for international governance of the 10 per cent of the planet that is the Antarctic. Necessarily then, the ATS is a regular feature across the chapters of this volume, permeating the human and non-­human (as it does both the concrete and the imagined), but the consistency of its presence ought not to be confused with a monolithic power to shape Antarctic politics.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 7

21/12/2016 10:11

8  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica The regional structure provided by the ATS remains anchored in the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. We can see that the foundational politics of the Antarctic Treaty are with us still. This presents both strengths (continuity perhaps; strong buy-­in from particular states) and challenges (accommodating newer participants and different interests; consistency with the emerging global order; responding to climate change, among others). At the same time, it has its roots in a Cold War world that looks and feels rather different to our present one. Though often considered emblematic of progressive concerns for environmental protection and limiting human impact upon nature, the Antarctic Treaty was agreed within a context where Antarctica’s economic potential appeared poor for financial rather than moral reasons, and in which climate change was entirely separated from the realm of human agency. Nor did the ambitions and anxieties embodied in the Treaty’s text necessarily correspond to global concerns. When the Treaty declared the Antarctic a nuclear-­free zone, its exceptionality stood in pointed contrast to other parts of the world (many still under European colonial rule) where nuclear testing, dumping and storage was routine and long-­ lasting in terms of shaping the environmental geographies and histories of the Cold War.26 We are writing about the politics of Antarctica in a very different period of human engagement. Separated by only five and a half decades, the scale and pace of change is remarkable in one sense. Climate change is capable of rendering Antarctica unrecognizable to those who sat down to negotiate its future in the late 1950s. Scientists warn that the WAIS could be literally undermined above and below sea level by warming air and ocean currents. A 2016 press release accompanying climate modelling research on the WAIS noted that ‘Choices that the world makes this century could determine the fate of the massive Antarctic ice sheet. A study published in Nature finds that continued growth in greenhouse-­gas emissions over the next several decades could trigger an unstoppable collapse of Antarctica’s ice – raising sea levels by more than a metre by 2100 and more than 15 metres by 2500’.27 Climate change was an important polar research field even before the Treaty’s ­signature: indeed, it constituted the emblematic scientific objective of the path-­breaking Norwegian–British–Swedish Antarctic Expedition of 1949–52.28 Yet in the 1950s the prospect of warming polar regions was widely recognized as a good thing, produced by natural rather than human actions. Among the first voices to link polar warming with deleterious global consequences was the British geographer and glaciologist John Mercer, who in 1968 warned that the WAIS was capable of collapse precisely because much of it was grounded below sea level and thus capable of being eroded by any sea level rise or ocean warming. The object being subjected to a new governance regime might not be as stable or bounded as was first thought – and human actions far further north could be the agent of that change. Ten years later, Mercer was even more pessimistic about the future endurance of the WAIS: If the CO2 greenhouse effect is magnified at high latitudes, as now seems likely, de-­glaciation of West Antarctica would probably be the first disastrous result of continued fossil fuel consumption. A disquieting thought is that if the present highly simplified climatic models are even approximately correct, this de-­glaciation may be part of the price that must be paid in order to buy enough industrial civilisation to make the changeover from fossil fuels to other sources of energy. If so, major dislocation in coastal cities, and submergence of low-­lying areas like Florida and the Netherlands, lies ahead. More sophisticated climatic modelling may show that the outlook is less alarming than this, but on the other hand, it may show that the situation is even more threatening. The urgent need for this sophisticated modelling is evident.29

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 8

21/12/2016 10:11

Introduction: the politics of Antarctica  9 Mercer’s call for further research in order to understand the global ramifications of Antarctic geophysical change is as important today as it was then. As social scientists, moreover, we might ponder whether we also need new forms of imaginaries and language attuned to words like collapse, disaster and melting that reflect diminished confidence in the stability of objects and processes associated with the resource-­based structures of capitalism. While we have become accustomed to thinking of earlier Antarctic expeditions as heroic and glorious while nevertheless being flawed and even disastrous, we are less comfortable with thinking of the governance system of the modern Antarctic as a structure the ideals of which might be lauded without precluding rigorous analysis of myths of stability and inevitable progress.30

ANTARCTICA’S HOT POLITICAL ISSUES One of the best examples of how Antarctic and global politics have meshed in the past (and may do so again in the future) concerns mining and mineral extraction. During the 1980s a series of negotiations led to the proposed Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities (CRAMRA),31 a document that was intimately linked to the concerns of Malaysia and other states discussed above. Yet CRAMRA was never adopted. In its place emerged the Madrid Protocol with its specific prohibition on mineral resource activities,32 thanks largely to pressure from Australia and France to inscribe the emerging environmental norms of the mid-­to late 1980s upon Antarctica. But interest in these resources, like rust and taxes, even global warming, never sleeps. While formally there is no inevitability about the ending of the prohibition, the complex procedure and timeline around modification or amendment of the Madrid Protocol does allow for the possibility that the prohibition could be lifted some time after 2048. The current prohibition itself has not stopped speculation that it might be lifted or simply ignored. Novelists such as Kim Stanley Robinson and L.A. Larkin have imagined a future Antarctica marked by both resource extraction and conflict.33 Whether or not the prohibition on mining is eventually lifted, the possibility is an enticingly twinkling light for those who think it might be a good idea – or who look to other places such as the Arctic and the deep seabed and question how exceptional a space the Antarctic really ought to be. As a result, decades out from the timeline for calling a review, states and commercial entities are, according to some reports, already positioning themselves in relation to what they imagine may be one of history’s greatest resource opportunities.34 This means that the resources question is already exercising an affective political force within and on the ATS. From the vantage point of the second decade of the twenty-­first century, hydrocarbons seem the more immediate focus of interest – and may be preceded (and potentially encouraged) by oil and gas activity around the sub-­Antarctic islands that lie beyond the ATS. There are many factors operating in the mineral resource issue, including: the seemingly insatiable global appetite for hydrocarbons (thus far not significantly hindered by the outcome of the 2015 Paris Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, COP);35 the enabling role of technology; and commercial interests in exploitation and national strategic interests (including on the part of claimant states – the claims of which become more attractive to them precisely because of the supposed resources benefits).

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 9

21/12/2016 10:11

10  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica This addition to the possibility of further resource exploitation, regardless of whether it might be environmentally sustainable or conducive to species survival, is further connected to another exercise in Antarctic boundary-­making that relates to but is not determined by the ATS – the delimitation of outer continental shelves (OCS) by states with pre-­1959 claims to Antarctic coasts. In March 2016 international media were quick to seize upon a short press release from the UN Commission on the Limits on the Continental Shelf regarding an Argentine submission. The government of Argentina was quick to publicize the view of the Commission that it had made a supportive recommendation on its submitted materials regarding the OCS off the Argentine coastline. While the Commission excluded from its recommendation any reference to the disputed South Atlantic islands of the Falklands/Malvinas, South Georgia and any Antarctic territories, media reporting was less careful in its assessment. Some headlines appeared to suggest that Argentina had acquired sovereign rights over vast areas of the South Atlantic and Antarctic.36 While the reporting was often careless, it goes to the heart of what we have alluded to above: a pervasive sense that the question of owning and exploiting the Antarctic remains a live one. Whether either Antarctic or global ecosystems could sustain a massive Antarctic hydrocarbon ‘bonanza’ is not a matter for open debate, especially within the ATS. Meanwhile, marine living resource harvesting continues to expand and ATS parties argue over the scale and extent of marine protected areas around the Southern Ocean.37 In the face of interest in both future hydrocarbon extraction and current and near-­term fishing activity, the increasingly serious and compelling evidence of the effects of anthropogenic climate change on the Antarctic ice sheets and marine environments appears to be having no impact in policy terms.38 Viewed objectively, this presents a first-­order failure of the imagination of the current Antarctic policy system. If climate change really ‘Changes Everything’,39 then the lack of change in attitudes and actions toward Antarctica is particularly notable. While a great deal of the critical baseline data on climate change comes out of Antarctic research – and recall that in formal terms science is a central pillar of the Antarctic system, and often claimed as its raison d’être – this is not reflected in the behaviour and positioning of individual states, let alone in the functioning of the regional regime itself, which asserts no particular role in relation to responding to the problem of climate change. Perhaps the interested parties concerned are just not capable at present at grasping an inconvenient truth – that the future facing Antarctica is shocking. Not solely related to the resource issues, although clearly coupled to some degree or another, is the issue of control over access to, and the modalities of human activity in, Antarctica. Various established Antarctic interests are evident here. For the United States – the deus ex machina at the creation of the ATS – a preference for a status quo Antarctica with only minimal development of the ATS and the maintenance of its dominant position was indicative of a wider preference for open access (an ‘open door’ in earlier parlance) and integration into Western-­led governance projects around the world including East Asia.40 For the claimant states – and the semi-­claimant states of Russia and the United States – continued dominance of the quasi-­green room where Antarctic decision-­making is made remains essential,41 while the original signatories (and the now wider group of decision making Antarctic parties) also have privileged positions to protect. We might identify an ideological and material struggle between a de facto Western bloc (variously reflecting US, original signatory, claimant and Anglosphere interests) and ‘rising Asia’ (particularly China). All five of the Permanent Members (the P5) of the most

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 10

21/12/2016 10:11

Introduction: the politics of Antarctica  11 powerful global grouping, the UN Security Council, are already decision-­making parties across all the ATS instruments. Changing the present Antarctic power arrangements would be no easy task. Insecurity about national strength seems to be resurgent around the world – not least among the states that have most apparent power and influence – leading to what Dodds and Hemmings have described elsewhere as a form of ‘frontier vigilantism’ and ‘polar Orientalism’ on the part of claimant states.42 The position that any investment or activity undertaken in the Antarctic by Asian actors is infused with ulterior motives such as resource interest or strategic consolidation echoes concerns about Asian interest in the activities of the Arctic Council, with a similar underlying presumption regarding who does and does not naturally belong. Officially, it should be noted that Australia and China inaugurated a Joint Committee on Antarctic and Southern Ocean Collaboration in March 2016 while Australian media and political commentators worry about China’s growing presence on the ice. As one commentator noted in the journal of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute a month earlier: As Australia has claimed 42% of Antarctica since 1933 – an area equal to three quarters of the size of mainland Australia – there’s no doubt that we should be more aware of Chinese interests and aspirations. Article 4 of the Antarctic Treaty provides that no Antarctic claim (there are seven) are either disputed nor recognised, and further states that ‘no new claim shall be asserted while the present (Antarctic) Treaty is in force’, effectively protecting Australia from other states making overt or public claims to our external territory.43

What this means for the internally collegial approach of the ATS (whatever prerogatives it may have believed it had in relation to non-­parties) and the cohesiveness and functionality of the ATS is not yet clear. But if, as some seem to be seeking, some form of the ­‘containment of China’ policy is tried in Antarctica too, the prognosis cannot be encouraging. Australia’s decision to promote co-­operation with China in the Southern Ocean is perhaps indicative of a certain kind of political realism on its part. At the same time, neither of these groupings (or other key ATS decision-­making states from the Global South)44 have clear interest in advancing ideas such as Global Commons, or in accommodating the interests of states that cannot meet the present entry standards for decision-­making status within the ATS ‘by conducting substantial scientific research activity there, such as the establishment of a scientific station or the dispatch of a scientific expedition’.45 There appears to be an increasing mismatch between the nature and capacity of the present ATS and global realities, including in relation to the process and consequences of globalization. Among the challenges here are the risks of a hollowing out of the ATS as new activities fall outside its explicit remit, being left either unregulated or subject to generic global approaches.46 Environmental protection is again a contentious issue in Antarctica, and perhaps needs to be put into perspective given the fears registered about the long-­term fate of the WAIS. One consequence of the collapse of CRAMRA and the adoption of the resource-­ restrictive Madrid Protocol instead was a decade and a half of framing Antarctica in terms of rigorous environmental protection as the hegemonic norm. That phase has passed. As the possibility of re-­opening the minerals question gets closer, and as the capacity to exploit Antarctica gets greater, reaching consensus around environmental issues has become rather harder. The on-­going question of marine protected areas (MPAs) is illustrative. On the pro-­MPA side is an argument, supported by fisheries science

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 11

21/12/2016 10:11

12  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica informed by a conservationist ethos, that additional protections are required in the face of human activity levels (particularly in fishing) and climate change effects and uncertainties. On the critical side are states with a significant interest in fishing, and non-­Western states that dispute the fisheries science, suspect the motives (and point to the close correlation between areas proposed for MPAs and their proponent’s territorial claims in Antarctica), and do not necessarily share the historic commitment to the forms of environmental management embedded in Antarctica. The first MPA (designated in 2009) has so far been the only one. Broader issues are surely at play here – geopolitics and the struggle for mastery over a preferred Antarctic future; fundamental differences (perhaps political, but also cultural and historic) over what to value, where and how to protect and who to decide; and whether the moral value of consensus still provides capital for and within the ATS. As this handbook suggests, the politics of Antarctica is contested and contestable, and where co-­operation and consent prevail then the reasons for that agreement ought to be scrutinised rather than simply lionised. Polar science and scientists are no longer the magic bullets for political dispute they were once assumed to be.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE VOLUME The coverage in this handbook is structured around four sections: Conceptualizing Antarctica, Acting in and Beyond Antarctica, Regulating Antarctica and Futures in Antarctica. The rationale for this structuring is to ensure that the reader can get a good sense of how the Antarctic has been imagined as place; how Antarctica has been invested with qualities that are not fixed by geographical co-­ordinates and location; how Antarctica has been governed and regulated; and finally how Antarctica has been enrolled in a series of future-­orientated projects that reveal something about how this continent and surrounding ocean is increasingly at the front line of planetary debates. Antarctica has been, and will continue to be, transformed by forces beyond its control – but it will also increasingly make its presence felt on other areas of the planet. Conceptualizing Antarctica opens with ‘Fictionalizing Antarctica’, in which Elizabeth Leane considers how politics and Antarctica come together in English-­language literature about the region. Shirley Scott, in ‘Three waves of Antarctic imperialism’, reflects on how framings, from colonialism through imperialism, anti-­imperialism and post-­imperialism have structured thinking about the continent and its legal structure. Klaus Dodds and Christy Collis (in ‘Post-­colonial Antarctica’), and Nicoletta Brazzelli (in ‘Heroic and post-­colonial Antarctic narratives issues’) remind us how the heroic figure played an important role in cementing and consolidating a particular Euro-­American engagement with the frozen continent. Lisa Bloom considers how creative engagements with Antarctica can challenge a range of issues related to representations of gender in ‘Antarctica: feminist art practices and disappearing polar landscapes in the age of the anthropocene’. The best-­known framing of Antarctica since the IGY is examined by Aant Elzinga in ‘The Continent for Science’, before Juan Salazar takes us into the digital present in ‘Mediating Antarctica in digital culture: politics of representation and visualisation in art and science’. The place of important global legal principles, ‘Common interest and common heritage in Antarctica’, is explored by Rüdiger Wolfrum. In ‘Modern explorers’, Peder Roberts considers how even in recent years feats of exploration have

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 12

21/12/2016 10:11

Introduction: the politics of Antarctica  13 continued to reveal political dynamics within and beyond Antarctica, and Alessandro Antonello looks at the ways in which actors in Antarctica now view and use that space in ‘Life, ice and ocean: contemporary Antarctic spaces’. As anyone with a television will know, Antarctic images and wildlife are now deployed in advertising, as Hanne Nielsen shows in ‘Selling the south: commercialisation and marketing of Antarctica’. The section ends with Klaus Dodds’ overview of ‘Antarctic geopolitics’, which explores and interrogates how geopolitical imaginaries and practices have been pivotal in shaping the politics of Antarctica. In Acting in and Beyond Antarctica the coverage turns to what one might see as the ‘performance’ of Antarctic politics in Antarctica, through a series of snapshots of key events and players. Roger Launius enquires into the Cold War grounding of the Antarctic dispensation in ‘Establishing open rights in the Antarctic and outer space: Cold War rivalries and geopolitics in the 1950s and 1960s’. Marcus Haward looks at the continued role of the twelve states that participated in the IGY in Antarctica and how they went on to adopt the Antarctic Treaty in ‘The originals: the role and influence of the original signatories to the Antarctic treaty’, before Patrizia Vigni and Francesco Francioni consider the claimant positions in ‘Territorial claims and coastal states’. The most acute challenge to both the hegemony of the ATS and Antarctic territorial claims was that mounted by the ‘Group of 77’ developing nations in the 1980s through the annual Question of Antarctica, and this is the focus for Peter Beck in ‘Antarctica and the United Nations’. While the ATS remains a largely states-­based system, in relation to marine living resources (and increasingly in relation to other European Antarctic projects) the European Union is a major player, and Nils Vanstappen and Jan Wouters develop this in ‘The EU and the Antarctic: strange bedfellows?’ The emerging superpower China is examined by Anne-­Marie Brady in ‘The past in the present: Antarctica in China’s national narrative’, while Brazil is examined by Daniela Sampaio, Adriana Abdenur and Ignacio Cardone in ‘A modest but intensifying power? Brazil, the Antarctic Treaty System and Antarctica’. Peder Roberts takes us full circle, concluding the section with a chapter on ‘The politics of early exploration’. Regulating Antarctica continues the focus on performance in Antarctica, but at a finer scale of resolution in the operation of politics through regulation of particular activities. Adrian Howkins opens the section with ‘Politics and environmental regulation in Antarctica: a historical perspective’. The operationalization (perhaps often the failure) of environmental duties at the most crowded location in all Antarctica is documented by Christina Braun, Fritz Hertel and Hans-­Ulrich Peter in ‘Environmental management: the Fildes Peninsula Paradigm’. Tourism, the dominant commercial activity on the continent itself, is considered in ‘The changing face of political engagement in Antarctic tourism’ by Daniela Liggett and Emma Stewart; and the challenges of responding to misadventure involving tourists, national Antarctic programmes and fishing operators are examined by Julia Jabour in ‘Southern Ocean search and rescue: politics and platforms’. The waters around Antarctica are the sites of a substantial global fishery regulated by the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), and this is the subject of two chapters. The first, by Henrik Österblom and Olof Olsson, provides an overview of the fisheries regime in ‘CCAMLR: An ecosystem approach to the Southern Ocean in the anthropocene’. Cassandra M. Brooks and David G. Ainley look at the realities of ecosystem-­based-­management and discuss the present difficulties around designating marine protected areas (MPAs) in Antarctic waters in ‘Fishing

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 13

21/12/2016 10:11

14  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica the bottom of the Earth: the political challenges of ecosystem-­based management’. The relationship between the regional regime (the ATS) and a global instrument (the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea) is unpicked by Tim Stephens in ‘An icy reception or a warm embrace? The Antarctic Treaty System and the International Law of the Sea’. If Antarctica is compared, it is invariably with the Arctic; and if the 1959 Antarctic Treaty is compared to anything, it is the 1920 Spitsbergen Treaty. The Spitsbergen (now Svalbard) model is examined by Stuart Kaye in ‘Svalbard and Antarctica: problems and solutions’. Concluding this section are considerations of Antarctica’s built environment. Ricardo Roura focuses on the mechanisms for designating and managing Antarctic heritage sites in ‘Antarctic cultural heritage: and geopolitics and management’, while Dag Avango explores the legacies of industry in Antarctica in ‘Working geopolitics: sealing, whaling, and industrialized Antarctica’. With the fourth and concluding section of the book, Futures in Antarctica, we look forward. Alan D. Hemmings explores the implications for Antarctica, and its system of governance, of the manifestly changing global order in ‘Antarctic politics in a transforming global geopolitics’. With the impacts of anthropogenic climate change transforming the region, if not yet our political response to it in the ATS or elsewhere, Steven L. Chown examines ‘Antarctic environmental challenges in a global context’. Nationalism is on the rise in relation to Antarctica, as elsewhere. Matt Benwell looks at one sub-­regional manifestation of this in ‘Argentine territorial nationalism in the South Atlantic and Antarctica’. In ‘Global legal norms in the Antarctic’ Ruth Davis considers the values that the ATS has enshrined and examines the extent to which it has reflected or incorporated emerging principles of international law. The Antarctic Treaty has at its core various provisions to remove or contain traditional security concerns. Elizabeth Nyman considers the continuing salience of these concerns and responses, and looks at the broadening conception of security in ‘Contemporary security concerns’. The section, and the volume, concludes with Lize-­Marié van der Watt investigating the emergence of environmental discourse as a privileged space in Antarctic politics, in ‘Contemporary environmental politics and discourse analysis in Antarctica’. We have no concluding statement per se, and nor do we offer a fully-­fledged manifesto for future research. What we have instead offered is a scholarly audit of the politics of Antarctica and something of an academic appeler aux armes. Our contributors explore widely over challenging and frequently slippery terrain, suggesting that Antarctica is rather less stable and static than often imagined. Where appropriate, therefore, they avoid appeals to solidity and fixity when discussing the politics of Antarctica. We, as authors and editors, can admire the ATS without worshipping it, and acknowledge its impact without attributing to it a post-­millenarian quality of structural hegemony and eternal vision. Indeed, such resistance is crucial if we are to imagine different political languages, practices and imaginaries for a space infused with uncertainty and at times conflict and tension about how best to manage the resources of the continent. We can think about human contact with Antarctica as so modest that on a geological timescale it would barely register. And yet within 200 years, humans have proven capable of hunting and killing millions of seals and whales, plundering the Southern Ocean for fish and krill, staking claims to unpopulated territories, and capable of inflicting severe damage to the structural integrity of the polar continent itself through anthropogenic climate change. This may not be a story that those working inside governance structures

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 14

21/12/2016 10:11

Introduction: the politics of Antarctica  15 such as the ATS wish to tell; this may not be something scientists and tourists living, working and visiting the Antarctic wish to contemplate; and this may not be evident in discussions about the political management of the continent at the annual Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings or meetings of CCAMLR’s Commission. But these kinds of stories do need to be told and shared (and contested) perhaps more than ever as earth scientists and climate modellers imagine and write about a world without ice.47 It seems an enduring paradox that an object such as ice, which has been so critical in shaping the history of the Earth itself, including vast landscapes and seascapes, is now looking increasingly fragile and vulnerable.

NOTES  1.   2.   3.   4.   5.   6.   7.   8.  9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Leane 2016, 137. 1 December 1959, 402 UNTS 71. Gould 1948, 105. Glennon 1991, 488–90. Spiller 2015. The Antarctic Treaty System is defined in Article 1 of the Madrid Protocol as ‘the Antarctic Treaty, the measures in effect under that Treaty, its associated separate international instruments in force [identified separately below] and the measures in effect under those instruments’. The disputed territorial situation in the Antarctic contrasts strongly with the Arctic, where only tiny Hans Island is disputed, and then merely between two claimant states, Canada and Denmark (on behalf of Greenland). See for instance Roberts 2011; Hemmings, Rothwell and Scott 2012; Powell and Dodds 2014; Dodds and Nuttall 2016; Roberts, van der Watt and Howkins 2017. The charge of secrecy was made a number of times by representatives from the global South in the ‘Question of Antarctica’ debates in the UN General Assembly as noted in Beck (1984) in one of his earliest articles on the subject for Polar Record. Habermas 1973. Butler and Stockwell 2013. Elzinga 1992. For example, Bloom 1993, Collis 2009 and Glasberg 2012. Bloom 1993. 4 October 1991, 30 ILM 1461. Howkins 2015. Macfarlane 2016. Massey 2005. 29 December 1972, 1046 UNTS 120. 20 May 1980, 1329 UNTS 48. See, for example, Edney 1997. Massey 2005. Not least in relation to the Territorial Sea and Exclusive Economic Zones attaching to them. 10 December 1982, 1833 UNTS 397. 29 December 1993, 1760 UNTS 79. As noted in the essays contained in McNeill and Unger 2010. Tollefson 2016. Friedman 2004; Roberts 2011. Mercer 1978, 325. Kolbert 2014. 2 June 1988, 30 ILM 1455. Article 7: Prohibition of Mineral Resource Activities: ‘Any activity relating to mineral resources, other than scientific research, shall be prohibited.’ Robinson 1997; Larkin 2012. For example, ABC News 2015. 9 May 1992, 31 ILM 849. BBC News 2016.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 15

21/12/2016 10:11

16  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica 37. Dodds 2016. 38. Among recent alarming reports see for instance Golledge et al 2015; Winkelmann et al 2015; Hansen et al 2016; DeConto and Pollard 2016. 39. Klein 2014. 40. Barney 2015. 41. Some claimants also co-­ordinate on operational matters supportive of their territorial positions. The historically linked United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australian territorial interests were a factor in the visits of HMS Protector to the Australian and New Zealand claimed sectors in the 2015–2016 season, and agreements between the UK and each state. See: United Kingdom and Australia 2015; New Zealand and United Kingdom 2016. 42. Dodds and Hemmings 2009; Dodds and Hemmings 2013, 1429–1430. 43. Slevison 2016. 44. Which include Brazil, China, India, South Africa. 45. Antarctic Treaty, Article IX(2). 46. Hemmings 2016. 47. Pollack 2010.

REFERENCES ABC News. 2015. China’s interest in mining Antarctica revealed as evidence points to country’s desire to become ‘Polar Great Power’, 20 January. URL available at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-­01-­20/ china’s-­desire-­for-­antarctic-­mining-­despite-­international-­ban/6029414. Barney, T. 2015. Mapping the Cold War: Cartography and the Framing of America’s International Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. BBC News. 2016. Falkland Islands seek clarity on new ruling expanding Argentina’s sea control, 29 March. URL available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-­35914839. Beck, P. 1984. The United Nations and Antarctica. Polar Record 22(1): 137–44. Bloom, L. 1993. Gender on Ice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, L. and Stockwell, S. (eds). 2013. The Winds of Change: Harold Macmillan and British Decolonization. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Collis, C. 2009. The Australian Antarctic Territory: a man’s world? Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34(4): 514–19. DeConto, R.M. and Pollard, D. 2016. Contribution of Antarctica to past and future sea-­level rise. Nature 532: 591–7. Dodds, K. 2016. Fish and continental shelves: maritime security, sovereignty, and stewardship in the polar regions. Brown Journal of World Affairs 22(1): 239–60. Dodds, K. and Hemmings, A.D. 2009. Frontier vigilantism? Australia and contemporary representations of Australian Antarctic Territory. Australian Journal of Politics and History 55(4): 513–29. Dodds, K. and Hemmings, A.D. 2013. Britain and the British Antarctic Territory in the wider geopolitics of the Antarctic and the Southern Ocean. International Affairs 89(6): 1429–44. Dodds, K. and Nuttall, M. 2016. Scramble for the Poles. Cambridge: Polity. Edney, M. 1997. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elzinga, A. 1992. The interplay of science and politics: the case of Antarctica, in Svedin, U. and Aniasson, B.H. (eds). Society and the Environment: A Swedish Perspective. Dordrecht: Klewer, pp. 257–83. Friedman, R.M. 2004. Å spise kirsebær med de store, in Drivenes, E.-­A. and Jøllle, H.D. (eds). Norsk polarhistorie 2: vitenskapene. Oslo: Gyldendal, pp. 331–420. Glasberg, E. 2012. Antarctica as Cultural Critique. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Glennon, J.P. 1991. Foreign Relations of the United States 1958–1960, Volume II: United Nations and General International Matters. Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office. Golledge, N.R., Kowalewski, D.E., Naish, T.R., Levy, R.H., Fogwill, C.J. and Gasson, E.G.W. 2015. The multi-­ millennial Antarctic commitment to future sea-­level rise. Nature 526: 421–5. Gould, L. 1948. Strategy and politics in the polar areas. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 255(1): 105–14. Habermas, J. 1973. Legitimation Crisis. London: Beacon Press. Hansen, J., Sato, M., Hearty, P., Ruedy, R., Kelley, M., Masson-­Delmotte, V., Russell, G., Tselioudis, G., Cao, J., Rignot, E., Velicogna, I., Tormey, B., Donovan, B., Kandiano, E., von Schuckmann, K., Kharecha, P., Legrande, A.N., Bauer, M. and Lo, K.-­W. 2016. Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 16

21/12/2016 10:11

Introduction: the politics of Antarctica  17 paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2ºC global warming could be dangerous. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 16: 3761–812. Hemmings, A.D. in press 2016. The hollowing of Antarctic governance, in Goel, P.S., Ravindra, R., and Chattopadhyay, S. (eds). The White World: Science and Geopolitics of the Arctic-­Antarctic-­Himalaya. Lights Foundation: New Delhi and Springer. Hemmings, A.D., Rothwell, D.R. and Scott, K.N. (eds). 2012. Antarctic Security in the Twenty-­First Century: Legal and Policy Perspectives. London: Routledge. Howkins, A. 2015. The Polar Regions: An Environmental History. Cambridge: Polity. Klein, N. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. London: Allen Lane. Kolbert, E. 2014. The Sixth Extinction. London: Bloomsbury. Larkin, L.A. 2012. Thirst. Sydney: Murdoch Books. Leane, E. 2016. South Pole: Nature and Culture. London: Reaktion Books. Macfarlane, R. 2016. Generation Anthropocene: how humans have altered the planet for ever, The Guardian, 1 April. URL available at: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-­anthropocene-­altered­planet-­for-­ever. McNeill, J. and Unger, C. (eds). 2010. Environmental Histories of the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Massey, D. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. Mercer, J. 1978. West Antarctic ice sheet and CO2 greenhouse effect: a threat of disaster. Nature 271: 321–5. New Zealand and the United Kingdom. 2016. New Zealand and United Kingdom: Statement on Antarctic Co-­ operation Priorities to 2020 (20 January) https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/493451/antarctic_treaty_NZ_UK.pdf. Pollack, H. 2010. A World Without Ice. New York: Avery. Powell, R.C. and Dodds, K. (eds). 2014. Polar Geopolitics? Knowledges, Resources and Legal Regimes. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Roberts, P. 2011. The European Antarctic: Science and Strategy in Scandinavia and the British Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Roberts, P., van der Watt, L.-­M. and Howkins, A. (eds). 2016. Antarctica and the Humanities. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Robinson, K.S. 1997. Antarctica. New York: Harper Books. Slevison, A. 2016. Considering China’s strategic interests in Antarctica. The Strategist, 5 February 2015 Canberra: Australian Strategic Policy Institute. URL available at: http://www.aspistrategist.org.au/considering­chinas-­strategic-­interests-­in-­antarctica/. Spiller, J. 2015. Frontiers for the American Century: Outer Space, Antarctica, and Cold War. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tollefson, J. 2016. Antarctic model raises prospect of unstoppable ice collapse. Nature 531. URL available at: http://www.nature.com/news/antarctic-­model-­raises-­prospect-­of-­unstoppable-­ice-­collapse-­1.19638. United Kingdom and Australia. 2015. United Kingdom–Australia Antarctic Co-­operation Priorities: ­2015–2020. 1 December. URL available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/481574/Statement_of_shared_UK-­AUS_Antarctic_priorities.pdf. Winkelmann, R., Levermann, A., Ridgwell, A. and Caldiera, K. 2015. Combustion of available fossil fuel resources sufficient to eliminate the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Science Advances 1:e1500589. 11 September.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 17

21/12/2016 10:11

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 18

21/12/2016 10:11

PART I CONCEPTUALIZING ANTARCTICA

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 19

21/12/2016 10:11

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 20

21/12/2016 10:11

2.  Fictionalizing Antarctica Elizabeth Leane

In late 2004, bestselling novelist Michael Crichton published State of Fear, a thriller in which eco-­terrorists manufacture environmental disasters – including the deliberate fracturing of the Ross Ice Shelf by explosives – in order to maintain alarm over global warming and hence ensure continued funding to environmental organisations. While only one of the novel’s seven sections is set in Antarctica, the continent – and more particularly, whether and why its ice is melting – features frequently in the footnotes, graphs and ­bibliography that Crichton added (unusually) to his popular thriller. Despite mixed critical reviews, only a week after publication Crichton’s novel had ‘stirred intense reactions . . . from people at every corner of the debate about climate change’.1 Debate centred not only on Crichton’s depiction of radical climate change activism, rather than climate change itself, as a global threat, but also, as the controversy continued, on the authority he was afforded on the strength of his novel in influential forums: Crichton testified before a US Senate Committee at the invitation of a Republican senator, and was invited to a private meeting with President George W. Bush at the White House. Members of Council of the American Quaternary Association, writing in Eos (a magazine published by the American Geophysical Union), stated that Crichton’s ‘contention that global warming is a hoax’ would be ‘fine’ in a ‘work of fiction’: ‘Crichton is free to spin his tale as he pleases’. The problem, they suggest, is the ‘political use’ to which the text has been put and the resultant impact on ‘public perception’ of climate change science.2 Political scientist Gregory White agrees that, were it not for these disturbing developments, ‘it would be easy to dismiss the book as a laughable, poorly written yarn – suitable at best for a summer beach read’.3 Literature, politics and Antarctica come together in the State of Fear controversy in a very obvious way, but it is rare for a work of fiction to have such direct and immediate political impact. The commentators cited above imply that ‘work[s] of fiction’ are politically neutral as long they remain in the domain of literary entertainment. However, if Crichton had not been given opportunities to speak directly to politicians, would his novel – which reached number two in the New York Times bestseller list – have thus been rendered irrelevant to public debate about climate change politics? What do we make of the many other popular novels dealing with Antarctica, whose authors have not, as a result of their imaginative narratives, testified before senate committees? Can they be ­dismissed as ‘laughable, poorly written yarns’, read at the beach and therefore of no further consequence? What then of weighty narratives, read earnestly in tutorial rooms, libraries and studies? Does literary fiction about Antarctica need to be taken seriously, in terms of its politics, in a way that popular or genre fiction does not? In what follows, I offer some ways to begin thinking about the relationship between fiction, politics and Antarctica, both in the abstract and in regard to specific traditions, texts and genres. First, some caveats. Although my discussion here is limited to texts written in or translated into English, there are of course bodies of Antarctic literature in other languages, with their own corresponding scholarship, which may raise quite 21

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 21

21/12/2016 10:11

22  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica different issues from the ones I address here.4 The category ‘Antarctic literature’ itself often raises eyebrows. While I sometimes refer to Antarctica in terms of ‘setting’, I do not require that all or any of the text’s action take place in high southern latitudes for it to be worthy of discussion, but rather that it deal substantially with the Antarctic region. State of Fear is one example. Another is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798): although only part of the first of its seven stanzas is set in the far south, this poem is arguably the foundational work of Antarctic literature in English. Its evocation of a realm both beautiful and oppressive, its endowing of the continent with the characteristics of a hostile living creature, its use of the conventions of the gothic, and its journey of transformation in which the mariner can never completely leave the Antarctic behind, set a pattern which continues to influence literature dealing with the continent over two centuries since its publication. Thus defined, Antarctic literature comprises a surprisingly large number of texts – even putting to one side non-­fiction genres such as exploration narratives and travel memoirs, which are intimately entangled with imaginative works.5 Because of the sheer number of relevant texts, I have also put poetry and drama to one side here – although these literary modes can be just as political as any other6 – and focused on fiction. This chapter, then, presents a selection of approaches to the nexus between Antarctic fiction and politics.

LITERATURE AND PLACE Assumptions about the relationship between literature and place underpin any investigation of Antarctica, fiction and politics. A series of adjacent and overlapping subfields of literary studies, including literary geography, literary cartography and geocriticism, address themselves to this relationship. Marked as they are by an emphasis on interdisciplinarity, these approaches are useful to scholars working across disciplinary domains within ‘Antarctic studies’. Geocriticism, for example, asks, what, precisely, the literary study of space and place can contribute to work being done in the social sciences and vice versa. To what extent . . . do fictional depictions of place enrich our understanding of real-­world places? More specifically, do they contribute something that other modes of representation do not? Or, given the fact that literary texts are not subject to the constraints of veracity and falsifiability, should they be considered to have a weaker epistemological status than scientific or documentary representations of place?7

The last question speaks particularly to a place which has been dubbed ‘the continent for science’ – and to the controversy around State of Fear, in which Crichton’s strange use of the conventions of academic discourse gives an impression, at least to some readers, of an epistemological status denied to other ‘poorly written yarn[s]’. The geocritical approach, summarised by Eric Prieto, asserts that fictional representations of place can have a powerful performative function, changing the way we view the places through which we move . . . Because fictional representations of place are unconstrained by the demands of documentary veracity and scientific falsifiability, they can help to bring about real change in the world, fostering the emergence of new kinds of places.’8

Literature and place, in this view, are co-­productive.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 22

21/12/2016 10:11

Fictionalizing Antarctica  23 Antarctica – a place that was imagined by humans well before they ever encountered it – offers a prime example of this process. This is not to say that imagination somehow conjured the continent into existence, but rather that humans’ experience of Antarctica was mediated by the speculations, mythologies and fantasies attached to it long before any sealer, whaler or explorer caught sight of what might or might not have been its coastline, and that this mediation did not suddenly cease when people eventually began to encounter the ice. Thus while this chapter is entitled ‘Fictionalizing Antarctica’, the phrase is a little misleading, because imagination – as it manifested itself in cartography, mythology and eventually literature – has always been part and parcel of human ­understandings of the continent. Fiction does not, however, have free reign in its representation of Antarctica. The Antarctic – as we know and understand it – puts constraints on the kinds of narratives through which it can be represented: like any place, it enables certain plots and thematic preoccupations, and frustrates others. Humanity’s belated encounter with the region, its position on the globe, its early cartography, its remoteness, its lack of indigenous people, and its physical characteristics, have determined the kinds of stories that could be told. The process was (and is) iterative: as a storied ‘place’, Antarctica became associated with a series of tropes, symbols and plot arcs that fed into later narratives. Early fantastic voyages, quests, journeys of transformation, adventure tales, lost-­race romances and utopias gradually evolved into their modern descendants: heroic exploration narratives, science fiction, dystopias and post-­apocalyptic fiction, action/techno/ecothrillers and realist accounts of travellers ‘finding themselves’ in the south. Other kinds of stories are absent or rare. It would be difficult to set a novel of manners or a family epic in Antarctica. The far south is not an ideal setting for a society novel. The great Antarctic Bildungsroman has yet to be written. It is unsurprising that a continent that immediately evokes grandeur, extremes, heroism, wilderness and purity has inspired precious few comedies and satires. The constraints that Antarctica puts on the kind of stories told about it translate into constraints on authorship. Certain genres, for example, are traditionally considered ­‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’, with corresponding assumptions about authorship and readership. When it comes to Antarctica, this politics of authorship is complicated (particularly in recent decades) by the question of access, of the creative writer’s ability to achieve a presence – and hence a certain brand of credibility – in the place about which he or she writes.

PRESENCE AND THE POLITICS OF AUTHORSHIP The Antarctic continent’s unique lack of an indigenous population means that almost all of its literature could be classed as colonial (and postcolonial9) – although not, as the term usually suggests, to indicate a literature produced by colonisers themselves, but rather a literature that requires some kind of colonisation – imagined or real – as its narrative basis. Even ‘lost race’ and utopian fiction that posits the discovery of indigenous people in Antarctica is a form of imaginative colonisation, and in practice usually requires a visitor from lower latitudes to set the action in motion. There are very few works of Antarctic ­literature that are not premised on a protagonist’s journey to (and sometimes from) the continent, even if this takes place outside of the text’s action. And for much

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 23

21/12/2016 10:11

24  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica of the history of humanity’s interaction with the continent, a journey of this kind was the domain of men, and particular kinds of men. While the whaling and sealing ships plying the Antarctic seas in the nineteenth century carried crews of diverse race, ethnicity and class origins, the early exploration of the continent was (with the exception of the Japanese Antarctic Expedition) undertaken by largely homogenous European, American and Australasian expeditions. Women were famously absent in Antarctica, except occasionally in a spousal capacity, until the later twentieth century. Although the men who initially ventured into high southern latitudes did not necessarily – or even normally – produce imaginative literature about it,10 and those who did publish fiction, poetry and drama about the continent were usually quite happy to be armchair travellers, the perception of the region as a space of male endeavour translated to the literary arena. The genres to which the region lent itself in its early years of exploration – such as adventure fiction, nautical fiction and whaling stories – were those associated with male authors and readers. While women published occasional short creative pieces about Antarctic exploration during the ‘Heroic Era’,11 none (to my knowledge) wrote English-­language novels about Antarctica for adult readers until the mid-­twentieth century. The first appeared only in the 1930s, both published under male pseudonyms: Albatross (1931), by John Presland (Gladys Skelton, an Australian), and The Wide White Page (1936), by Beall Cunningham (British writer Dorothy Beall Cunningham12). Unsurprisingly, neither text revolutionised assumptions about the Antarctic as a gendered space. Albatross tells the story of an airship commander found guilty of desertion when he is the sole survivor of a crash in Antarctica; only the first part of the narrative (a flashback) takes place in the continent, with the remainder focusing on the man’s recovery from the ordeal. Cunningham’s novel buys into a literary tradition dating back to the later nineteenth century in which the far south is seen as a testing ground for white males. In The Wide White Page, Antarctica is a ‘pure’, reinvigorating space where men made flabby by unemployment in Europe can start again under the autocratic leadership of a superman figure, an exiled European prince. The narrative readily deals with threats to this purity, which are mostly sexual. Two men whose friendship is considered unnaturally close fall – or possibly throw t­hemselves  – down a crevasse: ‘there was something rotten about those fellows,’ one character remarks in what seems like a metafictional reflection on the nexus between politics and plot mechanics: ‘They had to disappear’.13 Problems inevitably caused by a test woman imported as a necessity for the colony to reproduce are resolved when she throws off her ‘feverish restlessness’14 and finally settles down to family life. Recognizably feminist works of Antarctic literature did not appear until the later twentieth century.15 The question of who gets to go south is also a nationalist issue. State-­run Antarctic programs have long seen the benefit of putting writers as well as other creative artists on their territory, and gone to some lengths to get them there. While ‘Heroic Era’ expeditions took only dedicated photographers and cameramen, relying on their leaders to pen the appropriate narratives, they also produced and sometimes published creative works in ‘newspapers’.16 Ernest Shackleton famously took a printing press south on his Nimrod expedition to produce the first Antarctic book, Aurora Australis, which comprised expedition members’ literary efforts. In the late 1940s, Chile shored up its recent territorial claim by taking a number of literary authors and scholars on a ship voyage to the Antarctic Peninsula, including novelist Francisco Coloane and playwrights Enrique Bunster and Eugenio Orrego Vicuña. Their rapidly published responses, observes Adrian Howkins,

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 24

21/12/2016 10:11

Fictionalizing Antarctica  25 produced ‘a distinctively Chilean “vision” of Antarctica that contrasted starkly with the imperial vision of Great Britain’.17 The Chilean emphasis on the literary, Howkins argues, was a refusal of the scientific way of understanding the continent associated with Britain, and hence a ‘subtle epistemological challenge to Britain’s imperial justifications of sovereignty’.18 In the later twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries, sporadic visits by government-­ sponsored writers and artists evolved into official ‘writers and artists’ residencies in several national programs, including those of Argentina, the US, Australia, New Zealand and (until recently) Britain. While the rhetoric around these sponsored visits usually references the promotion of the continent’s ‘aesthetic values’ as enshrined in the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS), they can also be viewed as a form of public relations for a particular nation’s activities in the region. The Australian residencies, for example, require applicants to show ‘how they will benefit the Australian Antarctic program’.19 This is not to suggest that works produced from these residencies are never critical of their nation’s or humanity’s activities in Antarctica, but critical works too can shore up a nation’s sense of cultural engagement with Antarctica simply by adding to the sum total of artistic output: ‘we could even argue’, writes Elena Glasberg, that ‘[the US writers and artists program] is the cultural wing of a neoimperial project in Antarctica, one that operates beyond the need to legally claim territory . . . No matter what kind of art is produced . . . the state cannot fail to benefit’.20 Such residencies are not, of course, the only way to access Antarctica. Cruise-­ship tourism and the number of scientific stations are both on the increase, ­creating opportunities for those with sufficient funds or appropriate skills. These changes have seen expanding diversity in both the nature and authorship of Antarctic literature. Australian novelist L.A. Larkin, whose ecothriller Thirst I discuss below, makes it clear in her author blurb and acknowledgements that her narrative is grounded in her ­(presumably tourist) journey to Antarctica – a statement of credibility for a woman writing in a male-­dominated genre about a male-­dominated place. The issue of who writes about Antarctica, and with what authority, remains an active one.

READING ANTARCTIC LITERATURE POLITICALLY The term ‘politics’ has different, although related, associations depending on the disciplinary context. In literary studies, the genre of the ‘political novel’, narrowly defined, refers to a text dealing with ‘the macrostructures of national government, the exercise of social authority and the conflicts caused by the unequal distribution of wealth’.21 There are very few examples of Antarctic-­based novels concerned primarily with formal politics – A.E.W. Mason’s The Turnstile (1912), which centres on a polar explorer turned parliamentarian, is one exception. However, the term can stretch to include the utopia, a literary form that often details the sociopolitical workings of an imagined community as an alternative to, critique of or satire on the author’s own. As I have argued elsewhere,22 the continent’s position on the conventional ‘bottom’ of the world offers a metaphorics of opposition that, along with its perceived ‘blankness’, makes it an ideal location for texts of this kind: James Fenimore Cooper’s The Monikins (1835), James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), Valery Bryusov’s short story “The Republic of the Southern Cross” (1918),23 John Calvin Batchelor’s The Birth of the

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 25

21/12/2016 10:11

26  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica People’s Republic of Antarctica (1983) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica (1997) are some examples. However, while these texts may deal with the macro-­politics of particular nations or regions (usually the author’s own), with the exception of Robinson’s novel24 they say little about the geopolitics of Antarctica itself – a topic that evokes national expeditions, territorial claims, the ATS, the Madrid Protocol and ATCM meetings.25 In recent years, the genre that has lent itself most to explicit – if often superficial – ­­engagement with the region’s politics is the thriller (discussed below). The boundaries of the ‘political novel’ have become increasingly difficult to defend with the growing realisation that politics is not limited to governments, institutions and official representatives, but rather pervades all areas of life, including the private sphere. Contemporary literary studies as a discipline is less interested in the representation of formal politics than the politics of representation – the way in which a text deals with the operation of power and oppression. Any literary text can be read politically in this sense, even – perhaps especially – those that initially seem entirely apolitical. Coleridge’s ‘Rime’ is a salient example. ‘There is a total lack of politics in the Ancient Mariner’, wrote E.M.W. Tillyard in the late 1940s, voicing an opinion that few critics of the time would have contradicted: ‘with such a subject politics are not to be looked for’.26 Based around a journey to a remote, mysterious region, featuring all manner of strange supernatural beings, and told in archaic language, the poem seemed about as far from the turbulent politics of Coleridge’s day as it was possible to get. Yet only a decade after Tillyard, Malcolm Ware first suggested that the ‘spectre-­bark’ the mariner’s ship encounters could be read metaphorically as a slave ship, beginning a strong tradition of reading the poem from a postcolonial perspective. Many diverse political readings of the ‘Rime’ have since appeared, including some that emphasise the poem’s far southern location.27 While few Antarctic literary texts have received the critical attention that the ‘Rime’ – as a seminal poem in British Romanticism – has attracted, the continent has increasingly been recognised as a culturally significant space over the last couple of decades, with a concomitant expansion of political readings. Critics have examined both fictional and non-­fictional Antarctic texts from a variety of political perspectives, focussing particularly on nationalism, gender, postcoloniality and the environment.28 And this recognition of Antarctica as a political place, a place mired in the social and economic issues that characterise the rest of the world, has not been limited to critics. Literary texts themselves take attitudes – markedly different ones – towards the question of Antarctica’s exceptionality.

ESCAPE TO THE SOUTH? Antarctica often functions in literature as a place to which characters escape in order to get away from both personal and political chaos. In Mason’s The Turnstile, the central character, Harry Rames, clearly based on the bestselling novelist’s acquaintance Robert Falcon Scott, abandons his burgeoning political career to return south: ‘that arena of the House of Commons, where man fought with man, became a trivial place of meanness and intrigue, compared with the vast battle-­ground in the South where one fought in grandeur of silence with the careless, stubborn elements of a wild and unknown world’.29 Hall Caine’s The Woman Thou Gavest Me (1913), another bestseller, was written with the obvious political intent of persuading people of the need for more liberal divorce laws.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 26

21/12/2016 10:11

Fictionalizing Antarctica  27 The novel centres on an unhappily married woman who becomes pregnant by her lover, an Antarctic explorer. Blocked at every turn in England, the explorer determines quixotically to take his ailing lover with him to ‘the South Pole’: ‘what a glorious thing it would be to escape to that great free region from the world of civilisation, with its effete laws and worn-­out creeds which enslave humanity’.30 An Antarctic airship captain in Presland’s Albatross notes how little attention his men pay to ‘political news’, explaining that ‘here, in this ascetic wilderness of ours, it is man’s primitive needs which assert themselves. Compared with hunger, love, and hunting, politics is a superficial game which has no reality’.31 While these fictional explorers are part of an effort to extend Britain’s empire as far as it will go, politics and Antarctica are in each case constructed as opposite and competing realms, with the latter evidently the superior of the two. Antarctica is seen as a place apart, a purely natural realm immune from the trivialities of social convention and political intrigue. Other texts, however, are at pains to counter this exceptionality, to show that Antarctica has always been subject to the same socioeconomic forces that govern lower latitudes. Wolcott Gibbs’s Bird Life at the Pole (1931) – one of very few comic novels set in Antarctica – is a screwball satire targeting the cosy relationship between the newspaper publishing industry and polar exploration. A US expedition to the South Pole funded by the newspaper magnate Mr Herbst (a thinly veiled Randolph Hearst) not only confuses the north and south poles, but is also beaten to its goal by ‘Popular Polar Tours’. All of these problems, however, are readily fixed by media manipulation: ‘the idea people have of the South Pole’, the expedition leader is reassured as he poses against a backdrop borrowed from a Ziegfield ice-­ballet, is ‘the way they see it in the Herbst papers’.32 The escape south – literal or symbolic – can lead to a confrontation with the very ­situation the protagonist is attempting to avoid. In Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-­ prizewinning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), a Jewish refugee from Nazi-­occupied Czechoslovakia, Joe Kavalier, joins the US navy only to be stationed in Antarctica. The continent that appears to him a symbol of ‘his impotence in the war’ becomes instead a stage on which the world conflict is played out in tragicomic miniature: eventually Joe and the only other human seemingly alive on the ice, a German geologist, find themselves in armed confrontation, although neither wishes the other harm. Joe unintentionally shoots his sole companion in a place where ‘the only hope for survival . . . was friendly cooperation’.33 Ariel Dorfman’s The Nanny and the Iceberg (1999) centres on a Chilean expatriate, Gabriel McKenzie, living in New York, whose mother is heavily involved with the Chilean resistance movement. Heartily sick of being dragged along to political meetings, the young Gabriel sneaks out of one event, runs onto the streets and becomes transfixed by footage of Antarctica playing on some televisions in a shop window. He stares at the bank of screens, entranced by ‘mountains of ice floating on a sea that was black with waves’, blissfully unaware of any connection with ‘the Chile I had just repudiated’. Only later does he acknowledge the irony ‘that on the very night I declared my unilateral independence from my country I was waylaid by images of a silent crystal continent that was part of the territory of that country. . .’34 A number of years later, Gabriel finds himself involved in a nationalist scheme to drag an Antarctic iceberg to Spain, as the centrepiece of the Chilean pavilion at the Seville World’s Fair.35 Far from being an escape, the continent is here depicted as a place embroiled in nationalist politics.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 27

21/12/2016 10:11

28  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

REWRITING EXPLORATION NARRATIVES One way in which writers have responded to Antarctica’s history politically is by ‘writing back’ – retelling its founding narratives, fiction and non-­fiction, in ways that bring into focus people and perspectives these narratives erased or marginalised. These efforts have centred primarily on early twentieth-­ century Antarctic exploration, challenging the emphasis on empire building and heroic male endeavour that often characterises narratives and histories of this period. One of the best known is Ursula Le Guin’s short story ‘Sur’ (1982). Published anonymously in The New Yorker and purporting to be a newly discovered account of an early twentieth-­century expedition, the narrative describes a journey to the South Pole by a small group of South American women, which reached its destination a year before Roald Amundsen’s team. This famous polar ‘first’ is thus usurped not only by women but also by the ‘global south’. Safe in this knowledge, the narrator stores the account of her journey in her attic, to save Amundsen (and by ­implication, the whole heroic male endeavour) from embarrassment. The tale, with its urge to both assert and deny first arrival and conquest, to write and yet hide the account, is a complex one, as Glasberg has shown.36 Where Le Guin chooses alternative history, Norwegian writer Kåre Holt in The Race (1976)37 and Beryl Bainbridge in The Birthday Boys (1991) use fiction’s ability to give alternative perspectives on accepted history. Holt’s novel describes the so-­called ‘race to the Pole’ from the alternating viewpoints of Scott and Amundsen; Bainbridge gives each member of Scott’s team a chance to narrate. More recently, Rebecca Hunt’s Everland (2014) juxtaposes the traumatic experiences of a fictional ‘Heroic Era’ journey with those of a contemporary expedition based on the same Antarctic island, in order to explore the power dynamics inherent in teams and their relationship to the politics of memory. While the texts discussed above ‘write back’ to Antarctica’s exploration history, others specifically take on its literary history. Along with Coleridge’s ‘Rime’, a founding text of Antarctic literature is Edgar Allan Poe’s novella The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). Combining elements of the nautical adventure novel, gothic horror and lost-­race romance, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym recounts the protagonist’s journey to Antarctica – one characterised by mutiny, shipwreck, murder and ­cannibalism – and his encounter with an Antarctic island inhabited by a jet-­black tribe pathologically afraid of anything white. Pym’s Antarctic journey concludes abruptly when, in a canoe headed toward the Pole, he is confronted by an enormous human figure, with skin ‘the perfect whiteness of snow’.38 For those familiar with the Antarctic literary canon, there is an obvious link here with Symzonia (1820), an anonymous utopia in which an American Antarctic expedition discovers an ideal and startlingly white-­skinned people inside the Earth.39 Constructed by Poe as an unfinished account passed on to him by the late author (Pym), The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym inevitably produced sequels, most prominently Jules Verne’s An Antarctic Mystery (1898),40 eager to present solutions to its final mystery. Recent novelists have been more concerned with the novella’s racial politics: in Rudy Rucker’s The Hollow Earth (1990), a nineteenth-­century white Virginian teenage boy, accompanied by a black slave and Poe himself, enter a ‘mirror’ world inside the Earth where their skin colour changes from black to white and vice versa. The novel speaks directly, if playfully, to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and its politics, as well as

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 28

21/12/2016 10:11

Fictionalizing Antarctica  29 Symzonia and the Hollow Earth genre more generally. Mat Johnson’s Pym (2010) also replies both comically and quite seriously to Poe’s text, and to the racial politics of the wider Antarctic literary tradition. Simultaneously parody, sequel and critique, Pym centres on a black African-­American literature specialist, Chris Jaynes, recently dismissed from his white-­dominated university. Inspired by a newly revealed document that suggests The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym may be fact, he journeys to Antarctica, working with an all-­black crew as part of a venture to bottle the Antarctic ice as drinking water. His real aim is to look for the tribe Pym encountered: what for Pym is a nightmare, Jaynes sees as a utopia where his own blackness would be viewed as the norm, not the exception. However, like Joe Kavalier and Gabriel McKenzie, he finds that his flight southward only leads him metaphorically back to what he was trying to escape: he and his companions are enslaved by the subterranean inhabitants of the continent, a race of giant white humanoids of the kind Pym encountered at the end of his own journey. Like Poe’s, Johnson’s novel segues rapidly between genres: Jaynes’s intertextual adventure turned slave narrative becomes post-­apocalyptic nightmare when an unspecified global catastrophe occurs, wiping out communication with the outside world. Jaynes ends up sheltering in a biodome constructed by a white right-­wing survivalist, himself escaping low-­latitude politics by moving to a place ‘without taxes, and big government, and terrorist bullshit’.41 It is only when Jaynes heads north again – presumably back to what is left of civilisation – that he eventually achieves something like his utopian vision, an inverted version of Poe’s: ‘On this shore all I could discern was a collection of brown people, and this, of course, is a planet on which such are the majority’.42 Johnson’s novel contains no references to ­territorial claims or treaties: aside from the co-­optation of the ice itself into global capitalist economics, a conceit that recurs in dystopian Antarctic fiction,43 Pym does not engage directly with contemporary Antarctic geopolitics. Nonetheless, it is a deeply political text that satirises US race relations as they have been played out in the literature of ‘the white continent’.

GENRE AND GEOPOLITICS If, as geocritics argue, literary texts do not simply describe a particular place but rather actively contribute to that place’s coming into being, then is it possible to attribute to some texts a more significant role in this process than others? If so, what are the criteria? There are no easy answers to this question. While critics looking at Antarctic culture44 tend to focus on what Ken Gelder has called ‘Literature’ with a capital L45 – canonical, critically acclaimed, ‘serious’ or ‘high’ literature – most of these texts are vastly outranked in terms of the size of their readership by popular fiction. This raises the question of the capacity of popular fiction to have a political impact. Caution needs to be exercised, however, in ascribing influence solely on the basis of sales. Coleridge’s ‘Rime’ was published in a collection, Lyrical Ballads, that met with some negative press when first released, and the collection’s co-­author, William Wordsworth, blamed the ‘Rime’ in particular for the mediocre reception.46 However, Lyrical Ballads is now considered the founding text of British Romanticism and the ‘Rime’ is one of the most written-­about poems in English. A converse example is Caine’s novel The Woman Thou Gavest Me, mentioned above. Sparking a scandal upon its publication in 1913, the

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 29

21/12/2016 10:11

30  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica novel sold in astronomical numbers, but it is hard to imagine that more than a handful of people alive today have endured its 116 sentimental chapters. Influence is hard to gauge, depending as it does on the cultural capital assigned to texts, authors and genres, as well as raw readership figures. Popular fiction, Gelder argues, positions itself in opposition to Literature: where the latter values originality, creativity, novelty and individuality, the former values market success, reproducibility and reader pleasure.47 And while some popular fiction is indeed popular, selling in the millions, these novels are defined not by sales but by their adherence to these values – a novel that performs poorly in market terms can still be unmistakably identifiable as popular fiction. Popular fiction is synonymous with ‘genre fiction’ because its marketing and readership relies on its ability to fulfil expectations about the kind of story that will be offered.48 Readers of romances, fantasies, science fiction and thrillers know when they purchase a book that it will likely adhere to the (evolving) conventions of that genre. This has repercussions for the relationship between literature and place. The repetition in genre fiction of certain narrative arcs, characters and themes fixes these ideas to certain locations: ‘all popular genres . . . rely on prevailing and powerful associations between types of settings and types of stories to achieve their defining narrative and emotional effects’.49 In science fiction set in Antarctica, for example, it should be no surprise if aliens are uncovered beneath the ice, a narrative pattern that both draws on and consolidates a connection between the continent and concealment, repression and secrecy (among other things). The power of genre fiction to reinforce place associations is considerable, and for this reason alone ‘summer beach yarns’ cannot be easily dismissed by anyone interested in Antarctic politics, although they need to be analysed differently to ‘literary’ fiction. A glance at any of a number of online bibliographies of Antarctic fiction reveals that some genres dominate others at various points in time.50 In the later nineteenth century, when popular fiction as we now understand it was emerging as a cultural phenomenon, the boys’ adventure story (such as W.H.G. Kingston’s At the South Pole (1870)) was the predominant form of Antarctic novel. By the early decades of the twentieth century, ­lost-­race romances – some, such as Edison Marshall’s Dian of the Lost Land (1935), fixated on race, whiteness and masculinity – were common. By the 1930s, Antarctic science fiction (sometimes shading into horror) had also come into its own, with techno-­ optimistic visions of terraforming and mining (e.g. I.R. Nathanson’s ‘The Antarctic Transformation’ and Peter van Dresser’s ‘South Polar Beryllium, Limited’) countered by tales centring on the dire results of scientific hubris (for example, H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and ‘Who Goes There?’ by John W. Campbell Jr (writing as Don A. Stuart)). Post-­apocalyptic stories in which Antarctica acts as a refuge or site of regeneration after worldwide catastrophe also began to appear around this time (for example, J.M. Walsh’s ‘When the Earth Tilted’). From the mid-­century, however, the dominant Antarctic popular genre has been the thriller, beginning with Hammond Innes’s bestseller The White South (1949), and evolving quickly into a variety of subgenres, most strikingly the ecothriller. Popular genre fiction as a whole deserves more attention from critics interested in the literary representation of Antarctica. In the space remaining here, I want to examine – very briefly – some salient features of the Antarctic thriller, and particularly the ecothriller. Although the thriller comes in many forms and resists simple definition, a key element

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 30

21/12/2016 10:11

Fictionalizing Antarctica  31 is its ability to create a sense of heightened suspense in the reader – a ‘state of pleasurably anxious unknowing’51 – that ensures that reading will continue. The suspense of the thriller, David Glover suggests, is normally achieved by heightening the intensity and/or scale of the reading experience. Heightened intensity translates to extremes of violence done to the body (hence the prevalence, in thrillers, of psychopaths). Heightened scale means that the threat on which the narrative centres is seemingly limitless: hence, ‘the thriller trades in international conspiracies, invasions, wholesale corruption.’52 The reader must be kept in a ‘state of fear’: Crichton’s novel can in this sense be read as a comment on his own profession, as his ecoterrorists act like thriller writers, manufacturing disasters in order to maintain their support base. The tendency of the thriller to incorporate a large-­scale threat means that this more than other genre of the Antarctic novel deals explicitly with geopolitics – or at least what the public perceives to be geopolitics. As Paul Cobley, among others, notes, ‘verisimilitude’ or the ‘reality effect’ in the thriller depends not so much on the consistency of narrative with reality, but with ‘what is believed to be credible – politically, socially, topically – at any given moment by public opinion’.53 Thus Antarctic thrillers will deal with territorial claims and aspirations, clandestine resource-­grabbing, hidden military bases, double agents, illegal operations, treaty violations and terrorism. A thriller can be set anywhere, and indeed the broad-­scale nature of the threat means that the text’s action often ranges, James Bond style, over a series of widespread, glamorous locations. Antarctica’s unique brand of international governance, however, lends it something extra as a location: Matthew Reilly, author of the bestselling action thriller Ice Station (1998), when asked why he set his novel in Antarctica, replied that it was primarily because, as the only unowned territory on Earth, the continent was an ideal location for clandestine international intrigue.54 In addition, the continent’s status as the ‘last wilderness’ in public perception makes it particularly attractive to writers of ecothrillers. The plot of an ecothriller will normally hinge on the efforts of an individual protagonist, with or without sidekicks, to thwart the efforts of a villain, usually representative of a larger conspiracy, to cause an environmental violation or catastrophe (in the Antarctic thriller, examples include mining, melting or fracturing ice and nuclear explosions). While the hero (or, less often, heroine) will face all manner of dangers on a micro-­level (in Antarctica, the classic danger is the crevasse), the large-­scale environmental threat is necessary to maintain suspense throughout the narrative. Antarctic ecothrillers include Louis Charbonneau’s The Ice (1991); David Smith’s Freeze Frame (1992); Bob Reiss’s Purgatory Road (1996); Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica (1998); and L.A. Larkin’s Thirst (2012).55 In the ecothriller, then, global political issues are projected onto, and resolved by and through, individual characters. The novel’s conclusion will see the survival and happiness of the hero, the death of the villain, and the thwarting through the hero’s actions of a specific, time-­bound danger such as a deliberately fractured iceshelf (rather than, or perhaps standing in for, a more diffuse threat such as global warming).56 This resolution of the political through the personal is something that critics have found highly problematic. In his analysis of ecothrillers, Richard Kerridge argues that ‘ecological threats can be deployed for their scariness without ecological solutions being considered or given literary form . . . ecological solutions are replaced by quick, violent fixes . . . guardians and villains permit the rest of us to be an audience’.57 The form of the thriller struggles to deal with systemic

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 31

21/12/2016 10:11

32  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica problems on their own terms while still meeting readers’ expectations of fast-­paced action followed by a closed ending. Robinson’s Antarctica, unusual in its in-­depth examination of Antarctic geopolitics, can avoid – partially – this kind of false resolution of wide-­scale problems only by leaning toward a more traditionally literary mode: his near-­future narrative oscillates between ecothriller and critical utopia, with the characters finally gathering together to forge a new and more inclusive version of the Antarctic Treaty. The thriller’s condensing of a large-­scale threat onto an individual human villain has other political repercussions. The hero and the villain will often be inverted doubles of each other: while both may be superlative operators, physically and/or mentally, the villain may be ‘othered’ in some way, through (for example) race, nationality, or sexuality. Morris Dickstein writes that ‘standard thrillers . . . the action kind’ demand ‘simple ­villains but deviously complex conspiracies’ – the former shifting historically from Nazis to Russians (during the Cold War) to ‘swarthy scheming men with Middle Eastern accents’ more recently.58 Even if the villain does not officially represent a particular state power, he (or she) almost always has a national and racial identity. This has particular saliency in Antarctica where nationality automatically signals a position with respect to the ­continent’s geopolitics. L.A. Larkin’s Thirst (2012) is good example. The hero is an Australian glaciologist, Luke Searle, studying the impact of global warming on an Antarctic glacier. The villain, Robert Zhao Sheng, is the Chinese CEO of a global private equity company, working in uneasy alliance with his father, a Chinese military general. The threat is the fracturing of an Antarctic glacier with explosives, ostensibly to sell the ice thereby produced to a water-­short China (the novel is set in the near future) but actually to access rare earth elements to sell for weapons construction. Although the Chinese government is largely unaware of either scheme, one of the spectres in the novel is a potential Chinese claim on Antarctica – starting with Marie Byrd Land, the unclaimed sector where the action takes place.59 Australia’s own existing claim to an area of the continent over three times the size of Marie Byrd Land is never mentioned. Instead, national claims (and refusals) take place symbolically at the level of the individual and the body. Luke belongs in Antarctica the way Robert never can: ‘there was something peculiar about Searle’s connection to Antarctica’, the Chinese CEO frustratedly observes, ‘It was almost as if this wretched heaving mass of ice was keeping its protector alive’.60 This sense of belonging is partly a result of Luke’s intimate knowledge of the ice, as a glaciologist and long-­term Antarctic inhabitant, but cannot be divorced from his (white) Australianness. It is also tied up with a certain brand of heroic masculinity. ‘Smooth-­skinned, slim, of Chinese origin’, with an arm (and psyche) crippled by his brutal father, Robert is ‘dwarfed’ by the six-­foot-­three Luke, ‘the top of his perfectly parted hair only [coming] up to Luke’s chin’.61 Robert’s admiration and emulation of Robert Falcon Scott both highlights his neo-­imperial aspirations and shows up his distance from the continent’s quintessential heroic masculine stereotype: ‘What kind of prick would assume such a code name?’ asks Luke.62 Robert represents everything that the narrative frames as unnatural in post-­Treaty Antarctica – global capitalism, military interests, mining prospects – into which is bundled his Chinese nationality and damaged masculinity. This is not so much a criticism of Larkin’s novel, which is more complex than I have been able to indicate here and successful on its own terms as a thriller, or indeed of any individual text, but rather of the conventions of the genre, in which large-­scale problems are typically

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 32

21/12/2016 10:11

Fictionalizing Antarctica  33 worked through via physical conflict between an individual hero and villain. In attaching an environmental and/or territorial threat to the body of a villain, the Antarctic thriller entangles identity politics and geopolitics in potentially troubling ways. I began this chapter by asking whether Antarctic fiction should be considered, rather than ‘dismissed’ by those interested in politics, even if its influence is not, as in the case of Crichton’s State of Fear, direct and easily identifiable. The survey presented here of some of the diverse ways in which Antarctic fiction and politics interact is my answer to this question. There is, very evidently, much more work to be done.63 Our understanding of the far south as a storied location, and the way this relates to the politics of the region, will broaden and deepen as the Antarctic is increasingly recognised as a place about which the humanities might have something to say.

NOTES  1.   2.   3.   4.   5.  6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

New York Times 2004. Council of the American Quaternary Association 2006. White 2011, 18. See, for example, Essigman 2010; Munz-­Krines 2009; Guijarro Ceballos 2010. See, for example, Tallmadge 2009; Leane 2009a. See, for example, the Antarctic poems in Elizabeth Bradfield’s collection Approaching Ice (2010) or Mojisola Adebayo’s one-­woman play Moj of the Antarctic (2008). Prieto 2011. Prieto 2011. I use the term here to mean literature that self-­consciously interrogates Antarctica’s colonial history. See Dodds 2006 for a discussion of how postcolonialism might be considered in regard to Antarctica. To my knowledge, the first Antarctic novel written from direct experience of the continent was a boys’ adventure story, The Mystery of the Polar Star (1927), by Robert F. Scott’s former second-­in-­command, Edward ‘Teddy’ Evans. See Wemyss 1911; Boheme 1912; Watson 1913. See Manhire 2004, 20. Cunningham 1936, 265; original italics. Cunningham 1936, 242. For surveys of women’s writing about Antarctica see Brazzelli 2007; Leane 2009b; and Legler 2011. See Leane 2005 for an analysis of an early Antarctic newspaper as a ‘colonizing fiction’. Howkins 2008, 114–15. Howkins 2008, 115. See www.antarctica.gov.au/about-­antarctica/antarctic-­arts-­fellowship/how-­and-­when-­to-­apply. Glasberg 2008, 6. Liang 2013, 16. Leane 2013. Originally published in Russian in 1905. For a political reading of Robinson’s novel, see Vint and Bould 2009. Even twenty-­first-­century utopias often ‘blank out’ Antarctic politics – see Leane 2013. Tillyard 1948, 80. For example, Moss 2002. See, for example, Bloom 1993; Dutton 2009; Glasberg 2012; Rosner 1999. Mason 1912, 295. See Stafford 2011 for analysis of Mason’s novel with an Antarctic focus. Caine 1913, 554. Presland 1932, 30. Gibbs 1931, 49–50. Chabon 2000, 181. Dorfman 1999, 56. This part of the novel was based on a real event. See Korowin 2010. Glasberg 2012. First published in 1974 in Norwegian as Kappløpet.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 33

21/12/2016 10:11

34  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica 38. Poe 1999, 217. 39. The name of the author, ‘Adam Seaborn’, is an obvious pseudonym, and the identity behind it much debated. 40. Originally Le Sphinx des glaces (1897). 41. Johnson 2010, 236. 42. Johnson 2010, 322. 43. See, for example, Brockmeier 2006. 44. An exception to this critical trend is Kay 2011. 45. Gelder 2004, 11. 46. Brett and Jones 1965, xli. 47. Gelder 2004, 11–17. 48. Gelder 2004, 40. 49. Crane and Fletcher 2016, 22. 50. Laura Kay’s online bibliography ‘Polar Genre Fiction’, available at www.phys.barnard.edu/~kay/polar/ genre.php, is particularly useful in this context. 51. Glover 2003, 135. 52. Glover 2003, 138. 53. Cobley 2000, 20. 54. See Leane 2012, 23. 55. See Kay 2011 for a more comprehensive list. 56. I am simplifying here for practical purposes. There are, for example, ‘negative thrillers’ in which both the hero’s happiness and the stability of the social order are ambiguous at the text’s conclusion, as in the ­‘hard-­boiled’ thrillers of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler (Palmer 1978, 40–52). Antarctic thrillers do not tend to fall in this category. 57. Kerridge 2000, 245, 248. 58. Dickstein 2006, 89. Dickstein notes (89–90) that more ‘serious’ thrillers not are so polarised in their ­representation of the hero and the villain. 59. Larkin 2012, 222, 262–5. 60. Larkin 2012, 308. 61. Larkin 2012, 273. 62. Larkin 2012, 271. 63. I have not even touched, for example, on the way in which literature set in lower latitudes (such as late nineteenth-­century imperial adventure novels) may have influenced humanity’s relationship with the ­continent. See Hains 2002, part 1.

REFERENCES Adebayo, M. 2008. Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey. Pages 149–90 in Osborne, D. (ed.), Hidden Gems. London: Oberon. Bainbridge, B. 1991. The Birthday Boys. London: Duckworth. Batchelor, J.C. 1983. The Birth of the People’s Republic of Antarctica. New York: Dial. Bloom, L. 1993. Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Exploration. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Bradfield, E. 2010. Approaching Ice. New York: Persea. Brazzelli, N. 2007. In Never-­Never Land: the Antarctic in contemporary women’s writing. Pages 225–35 in Bottalico, M., Chialant, M.T. and Rao, Eleonora (eds), Literary Landscapes, Landscape in Literature. Rome: Carocci. Brett, R.L. and Jones, A.R. 1965. Introduction. Pages xvii–l in Wordsworth, W. and Coleridge, S.T., Lyrical Ballads, rev. edn. London: Methuen. Brockmeier, K. 2006. The Brief History of the Dead. London: John Murray. Brussof [Bryusov], V. 1918 (first pub. in Russian, 1905). The Republic of the Southern Cross. Pages 1–32 of Brussof, V., The Republic of the Southern Cross and Other Stories. London: Constable. Caine, H. 1913. The Woman Thou Gavest Me. London: Heinemann. Chabon, M. 2000. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. New York: Picador. Charbonneau, L. 1991. The Ice. New York: Donald I. Fine. Cobley, P. 2000. The American Thriller: Generic Innovation and Social Change in the 1970s. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Coleridge, S.T. 1987 [first pub. 1798]. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Pages 229–43, in Leonard, J. (ed.), Seven Centuries of Poetry in English. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 34

21/12/2016 10:11

Fictionalizing Antarctica  35 Cooper, J.F. 1835. The Monikins. Philadephia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard. Council of the American Quaternary Association. 2006. Petroleum geologists’ award to novelist Crichton is inappropriate. Eos: Transactions American Geophysical Union 87.36: 364. Crane, R. and Fletcher, L. 2016. Cave genres, genre caves: reading the subterranean thriller. Pages 9–24 in Fletcher, L. (ed.), Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Crichton, M. 2004. State of Fear. London: HarperCollins. Cunningham, B. 1936. The Wide White Page. London: Hutchinson. De Boheme, R. [Agnes Rose-­Soley] 1912. The Joys of Antarctica. The Bulletin 9 May: 36. De Mille, J. 1888. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. New York: Harper. Dickstein, M. 2006. The politics of the thriller: on Munich and moral ambiguity. Dissent 53.2: 89–92. Dodds, K.J. 2006. Postcolonial Antarctica: an emerging engagement. Polar Record 42.1: 59–70. Dorfman, A. 2003 [first pub. 1999]. The Nanny and the Iceberg. New York: Seven Stories. Dutton, J. 2009. Imperial ice? The influence of Empire on contemporary French and British Antarctic travel writing, Studies in Travel Writing 13.4: 369–80. Essigman, J.M. 2010. Ein kleiner, schwarzer Punkt am weisslichen Himmel: Antarctica and ice in German Expressionism. MA dissertation. University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Evans, E.R.G.R. 1927. The Mystery of the ‘Polar Star’. London: S.W. Partridge. Gelder, K. 2004. Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field. London and New York: Routledge. Gibbs, W. 1931. Bird Life at the Pole. New York: William Morrow. Glasberg, E. 2008. Blankness in the Antarctic Landscape of An-­My Lê. The Scholar & Feminist Online 7.1: 1–6. Glasberg, E. 2012. Antarctica as Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Glover, D. 2003. The thriller, Pages 135–53 in Priestman, M. (ed.), The Cambridge Guide to Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guijarro Ceballos, J. 2010. Melancolía del hielo: textos e imágenes sobre la Antártida. Mérida: Editora Regional de Extremadura. Hains, B. 2002. The Ice and the Inland: Mawson, Flynn, and the Myth of the Frontier. Carlton South, Victoria: Melbourne University Press. Holt, K. 1976. The Race. Trans. Joan Tate. London: Michael Joseph. Howkins, A.J. 2008. Frozen empires: a history of the Antarctic sovereignty dispute between Britain, Argentina, and Chile, 1939–1959. PhD dissertation. University of Texas at Austin. Hunt, R. 2014. Everland. London: Fig Tree-­Penguin. Innes, H. 1949. The White South. London: Collins. Johnson, M. 2010. Pym. New York: Spiegel & Grau. Kay, L. 2011. It was a very long dark and stormy night: ‘bad’ Antarctic fiction from the pulps to the ­self-­published. Pages 89–103 in Crane, R., Leane, E. and Williams, M. (eds). Imagining Antarctica: Cultural Perspectives on the Southern Continent. Hobart: Quintus. Kerridge, R. 2000. Ecothrillers: environmental cliffhangers. Pages 242–49 in Coupe, L. (ed.). The Green Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Kingston, W.H.G. 1870. At the South Pole; or, The Adventures of Richard Pengelley, Mariner. London: Cassell Petter Galpin. Korowin, E. 2010. ‘Iceberg! Right ahead!’ (Re)Discovering Chile at the 1992 Universal Exposition in Seville, Spain. Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 28: 48–63. Laing, S. 2013. Literature and politics. Pages 15–24 in Philips, D. and Shaw, K. (eds). Literary Politics: The Politics of Literature and the Literature of Politics. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Larkin, L.A. 2012. Thirst. Millers Point, New South Wales: Pier 9-­Murdoch. Leane, E. 2005. Polar newspapers as colonising fictions: the frontier journalism of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition. New Literatures Review 42: 25–43. Leane, E. 2009a. Eggs, emperors and empire: Apsley Cherry-­Garrard’s ‘Worst Journey’ as imperial quest romance. Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Culture 31.2: 18–34. Leane, E. 2009b. Placing women in the Antarctic literary landscape. Signs 34.3: 509–14. Leane, E. 2012. Antartica in Fiction: Imaginative Narratives of the Far South. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leane, E. 2013. Yesterday’s tomorrows and tomorrow’s yesterdays: utopian literary visions of Antarctic futures. The Polar Journal 3.2: 333–47. Legler, G. 2011. The end of the heroic illusion: how three generations of women writers have changed the ­literature of Antarctica. The Polar Journal 1.2: 207–24. Le Guin, U. 1982. Sur. The New Yorker (1 February): 38–46. Lovecraft, H.P. 2005 [first pub. 1936]. At the Mountains of Madness. New York: Modern Library. Manhire, B. 2004. Introduction. Pages 187–202 in Manhire, B. (ed.). The Wide White Page: Writers Imagine Antarctica. Wellington: Victoria University Press.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 35

21/12/2016 10:11

36  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Marshall, E. 1935. Dian of the Lost Land. New York: H.C. Kinsey. Mason, A.E.W. 1912. The Turnstile: A Novel. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Moss, S. 2002. Class war and the albatross: the politics of ships as social space and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Pages 77–88 in Klein, B. (ed.). Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate. Munz-­Krines, M. 2009. Expeditionen ins Eis: Historische Polarreisen in der Literatur. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Nathanson, I.R. 1931. The Antarctic Transformation. Amazing Stories (November): 230–39. New York Times. 2004. New climate thriller: scary, but is it science? (A.C. Revkin) 14 December: D2. Palmer, J. 1978. Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre. London: Edward Arnold. Poe, E.A. 1999 [first pub. 1838]. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. New York: Penguin. Presland, J. 1932 [first pub. 1931]. Albatross. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Prieto, E. 2011. Geocriticism Meets Ecocriticism: Bertrand Westphal and Environmental Thinking. Épistémocritique: littérature et savoirs 9: 3 January 2012 http://www.epistemocritique.org/spip.php?article 238&lang=fr. Reilly, M. 1998. Ice Station. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia. Robinson, K.S. 1997. Antarctica. London: HarperCollins. Rosner, V. 1999. Gender degree zero: memoirs of frozen time in Antarctica. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 14.1: 5–22. Rucker, R. 1990. The Hollow Earth: The Narrative of Mason Algiers Reynolds of Virginia. New York: William Morrow. Seaborn, A. 1965 [first pub. 1820]. Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery. Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints. Smith, D. 1992. Freeze Frame. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin. Stafford, J. 2011. Before Immortality: Captain Scott and A.E.W. Mason’s The Turnstile. Pages 53–61 in Crane, R., Leane, E. and Williams, M. (eds). Imagining Antarctica: Cultural Perspectives on the Southern Continent. Hobart: Quintus. Stuart, D.A. 1938. Who Goes There? Astounding Science-­Fiction (August): 60–97. Tallmadge, John. 2009. Shackleton in the Antarctic: tragedy, initiation, and the epic of endurance. Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 10.2: 43–55. Tillyard, E.M.W. 1970 [first pub. 1948 as Five Poems]. Poetry and its Background: Illustrated by Five Poems 1470–1870. London: Chatton and Windus van Dresser, P. 1930. South Polar Beryllium, Limited. Amazing Stories (August): 416–27. Verne, J. 1899. An Antarctic Mystery. Trans. Mrs Cashel Hoey. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott. Vint, S. and Bould, M. 2009. Dead penguins in immigrant pilchard scandal: telling stories about ‘the environment’ in Antarctica. Pages 257–73 in Burling, W.J. (ed.). Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable: Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland. Walsh, J.M. 1932. When the Earth Tilted. Wonder Stories 3.12: 1342–51. Ware, M. 1961. Coleridge’s ‘spectre-­bark’: a slave ship? Philological Quarterly 40: 589–93. Watson, K. 1913. The Small Brown Room. Pages 9–53 in Watson, K. Later Litanies. Melbourne: Thomas C. Lothian. Wemyss, E. 1911. Antarctica for Australia! The Register (Adelaide) 5 August: 4. White, G. 2011. Climate Change and Migration: Security and Borders in a Warming World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 36

21/12/2016 10:11

3.  Three waves of Antarctic imperialism Shirley V. Scott

The English-­language historiography of the pre-­Treaty international politics of Antarctica has always been infused with artefacts of colonialism, including consideration of a trusteeship arrangement for governance of the continent and the international legal categories of territorial acquisition. Application of a post-­colonial perspective to Antarctica has, in recent years, led to calls for critical interrogation of these artefacts and analysis of their enduring significance, but as yet there has been no agreement as to the precise nature of the relationship between Antarctica and imperialism. This chapter contributes to the task of clarifying this relationship. It begins by pointing to some of the complexities involved in applying an imperial lens to the international political history of Antarctica. The chapter then presents the international political history of the Antarctic territorial and governance question in terms of three successive waves of Antarctic imperialism. The chapter concludes by considering what can be gained through viewing the historical background to the Antarctic Treaty through a post-­colonial lens.

COLONIALISM, IMPERIALISM, ANTI-­IMPERIALISM AND POST-­IMPERIALISM Given ‘the long period of European imperialisms between the fifteenth and twentieth ­centuries’,1 it is in one sense unsurprising that the language of imperialism has been deployed in relation to Antarctica. On the other hand, referencing the international politics of Antarctica to imperialism, or to post-­imperialism, as has been done over the last decade,2 is more complicated than it might at first seem. There is no single definition of colonialism or imperialism and the phenomena are studied by scholars in a range of disciplines, who understandably place emphasis variously – for example on politics, economics, geography, or culture. Beyond Antarctic studies, postcolonial scholars are still debating whether postcolonial refers to a time period, place, condition, theoretical stance, or political ­practice – or whether it is too all-­encompassing a term to be useful.3 Perhaps the most obvious difficulty encountered in viewing the international politics of Antarctica through a post-­colonial lens is the absence of an indigenous human population; referring to Antarctic colonialism tends to prompt quips about penguins.4 Most scholars of Antarctica have sidestepped the issue by emphasising territorial ‘expansion’ as opposed to subjugation of indigenous peoples.5 This resonates with a dimension of the theoretical literature on colonialism that defines it as the ‘expansion of states outside their territory, a widening of geographical space, either by land or sea, extending boundaries of power and influence’.6 It is not too difficult to accept the applicability of the colonial concept to Great Britain’s Antarctic forays of the first half of the twentieth century if only because Britain itself perceived its post-­World War One Antarctic activity as a colonial project. The prime 37

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 37

21/12/2016 10:11

38  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica mover in the creation of Britain’s Antarctic policy after World War One was Captain Leopold Amery, Under-­Secretary of State (and from 1924 to 1929 Secretary of State) at the Colonial Office.7 The dominant postcolonial analytical approach to Antarctica in the English language literature, exemplified in Dodds’s important 2006 intervention,8 has been to perceive the territorial claim-­making in Antarctica during the first half of the twentieth century as colonial in nature and the 1959 Antarctic Treaty as having put the product of that process on hold, thereby clinging onto the colonial origins of ongoing political arrangements. This framing of the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) resonates with the broader study of postcolonialism, at least up to a point. The term ‘postcolonialism’ was first used in a literal sense to designate a period after political independence. From the late 1970s it has been used to refer to the legacies of colonialism that have endured despite the widespread process of decolonization in the post-­1945 world.9 While the dominant interpretation of the international politics of Antarctica thereby picks up on the enduring legacies of colonialism, the Antarctic experience is absent the all-­important step of decolonisation. A post-­colonial narrative minus decolonisation would seem to leave us with a colonial narrative, suggesting that the Antarctic Treaty might be understood as having enshrined, rather than ended, Antarctic imperialism. Characterising the Antarctic Treaty as placing Antarctica in some form of colonial time warp begs further analytical finessing. In legal terms, it is true that Article IV ‘froze’ the status quo so far as the territorial claims are concerned, but Antarctic politics were not frozen in time in a practical sense. The claimants have become a small minority of ATS members even as the ATS represents a minority of States; indeed, the demarcation between the ATS and other regimes has been subject to on-­going re-­negotiation as patterns of regional and global governance evolve. It may be the case that the claimants do not gain any great advantage even in legal terms, since even though they carry responsibilities and accept restrictions on their actions in Antarctica, few states recognise their claims. This points to the temporal as well as the substantive complexity of analysing empire. As Hart has put it, ‘In the story of empire and colony, there is no one simple linear narrative’.10 The United States affords a useful example: it was itself a colony of Britain and yet a century later emerged as an imperial power in its own right. What then becomes interesting is what we might refer to as the intersection of imperialisms over time and space. Colonialisms may on occasion be extended or nested, and anti-­imperialism, decolonisation, and post-­imperialism may exist alongside each other. Over a period of time the same state may function as both imperial subject and object. And so we return once again to the problem of identifying the ‘object’ of the Antarctic imperial project. Patterns of unequal power relationships can be discerned on any political canvas. If we are using imperialism to mean more than that, we would normally be starting with an act of dispossession and usurpation; to be an act of imperialism, someone loses something that is rightfully theirs – whether that be thought, land, or destiny. According to Ninkovich, ‘imperialism exists when an important aspect of a nation’s life is under the effective control of an outside power’.11 Here, the post-­imperial perspective of Sanjay Chaturvedi is informative. Chaturvedi regards the Antarctic Treaty as imperialistic because, by establishing science as the ­currency of Antarctic politics, it discriminates against non-­Western countries with less capacity for scientific research.12 This view suggests that in analysing imperialism we

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 38

21/12/2016 10:11

Three waves of Antarctic imperialism  39 should pay particular attention to sites of anti-­imperial rhetoric and action as indicative of a people’s feeling that they have lost something that is rightfully theirs. Resistance, sometimes violence, may be necessary after all for the analytical utility of imperialism – for it indicates that the resisters have perceived and/or chosen language to suggest that they are protesting the usurpation or threatened usurpation of ‘an important aspect’ of the life of their nation. As Comaroff and Comaroff explain: [t]he essence of colonization inheres less in political overrule than in seizing and transforming ‘others’ by the very act of conceptualizing, inscribing, and interacting with them on terms not of their choosing; in making them into the pliant objects and silenced subjects of our scripts and scenarios; in assuming the capacity to ‘represent’ them . . . 13

So far, the discussion has sought to emphasise the complexity of applying a ­ ost-­colonial lens to Antarctic affairs and to suggest the possibility of multiple, overlapp ping, and intersecting processes of Antarctic imperialism. The following section identifies three waves of Antarctic imperialism: the first led by Spain, the second by Britain, and the third by the United States.

THE FIRST WAVE OF IMPERIALISM The first wave of Antarctic imperialism took place from approximately 1415 to 1517, led by Portugal and Spain. Spain was the leader of this first Antarctic colonial project. Of particular relevance to the account here were the Papal Bulls of 3 and 4 May 1493, issued by Pope Alexander VI after the return of Columbus from his first voyage; the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal; and the confirmation of its terms by the Bull Ea quae of 1506. European Christians believed that the entire world was the property of God and that, as God’s delegate on earth, the Pope had authority to distribute it.14 The result of these documents was that Spain considered itself entitled to commission explorers to claim territory not already discovered, west of a line drawn from the Arctic pole to the Antarctic pole – 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Protestantism appeared within a generation of the Bulls of May 1493, and while Protestant leaders of England and France did not respect the authority of the Pope to make such edicts, their own ‘explorers’ were instructed not to seize land already claimed in the name of another Christian prince.15 During this first wave of Antarctic colonialism, Spain was the coloniser and Antarctica was rather peripheral to a process, the primary object of which was the people, ­territory, and resources of mainland South America (bearing in mind that the Pope had no k ­ nowledge of the Drake Passage). The end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth ­centuries ­witnessed the first era of decolonisation. Most Latin American States were former Spanish provinces, and each claimed sovereignty over the Viceroyalty or Captaincy-­General from which it emerged.16 Chile and Argentina acquired their independence in 1810 and 1816 respectively; Argentina inherited the territorial unit that had been occupied by the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata and Chile succeeded the Captaincy-­General of Chile within the Viceroyalty of Peru.17 The successor states considered themselves heirs to all the land that had been granted to Spain. Over the following decades a dominant issue in relations between Chile and

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 39

21/12/2016 10:11

40  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Argentina was to be the demarcation of their mutual boundary. The basic applicable principle was agreed to be that of uti possidetis, ita possideatis, ‘as you possess you may continue to possess’, which as applied meant the boundaries as they had been at independence. But the application of this principle raised many difficulties because boundaries had not been clear at independence; the fixing of boundaries dominated intra-­South American relations during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.18 The doctrine was specifically intended to ensure that, despite vast areas of the subcontinent not having been charted, no territory remained without a sovereign and available for attempted occupation by a European power.19 From the mid-­ nineteenth century onward the two countries addressed questions ­concerning their mutual boundary in the Straits of Magellan, Patagonia, and the Puna de Atacama. In 1906 Argentina proposed a mutual boundary in Antarctica of 67 degrees West. Both countries had already been active in Antarctica, Chile having, in 1902, granted a fishing concession within an area extending south to undefined limits,20 and Argentina having established a meteorological and magnetic observatory at Laurie Island in the South Orkneys in 1904.21 The two countries held talks on Antarctic matters between 1905 and 1908 and Chile, in 1907, put forward a draft treaty delimiting their Antarctic boundaries, but the matter remained unresolved.22 Overall, the South American Antarctic continued to be perceived as part of Spanish America. Although Chile and Argentina disagreed as to the location of their mutual Antarctic boundary and, indeed, the significance of the Antarctica question was rather different for each country,23 both confirmed on a number of occasions, including in 1941 and 1946, their recognition of the other’s unquestionable rights to sovereignty in the American Antarctic.24 During this first wave of Antarctic colonialism, the uninhabited Antarctic continent became caught up in efforts to regulate the colonial land grab of Spain and Portugal. This account fits a postcolonial framing insofar as it incorporates both colonisation and decolonisation, and indeed, resistance to the colonial project, albeit not by inhabitants of Antarctica.

THE SECOND WAVE OF ANTARCTIC IMPERIALISM INTERSECTS WITH THE FIRST WAVE The second wave of Antarctic imperialism fitted within the era of ‘high imperialism’ or ‘new imperialism’, usually dated from 1830 to 1914. This was the era of the ‘scramble for Africa’; in 1876 less than one tenth of Africa was under European control but by the end of the century nine tenths of its territory was claimed by European states.25 Britain’s early interest in Antarctica had been ‘sharpened’ by a number of scientific expeditions around 1900.26 Another primary impetus for the second wave of Antarctic imperialism was whaling, which in the early twentieth century necessitated shore stations. The first three companies to operate in Antarctic waters were Norwegian, and Norwegian labour dominated the growing industry.27 Fundamental to the era of the new imperialism was the concept of ‘terra nullius’ – that any land not yet governed by a central government with which the European colonising state could negotiate, was available for acquisition. Writing in 1926, Lindley referred to the Arctic and Antarctic regions as ‘the most important uninhabited areas that remain

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 40

21/12/2016 10:11

Three waves of Antarctic imperialism  41 open to acquisition as territoria nullius’.28 Land classified as terra nullius was available for acquisition by ‘effective occupation’. European colonial powers had agreed at the 1885 Berlin Conference that – at least in relation to Africa – discovery was insufficient to establish title. Colonisers needed to establish authority in the relevant region – to exercise effective occupation – and to notify other interested parties (to the Final Act of the Conference) of their claim.29 Britain was the leading power during this colonial era. In 1900, 25 per cent of the world population lived within the British Empire, which stretched across twelve million square miles.30 Britain did not develop an overt policy of Antarctic imperialism until 1919–20,31 at the tail end of the new imperialism. The applicability of ‘effective occupation’ to uninhabited and inhospitable territory was a matter of ongoing discussion; the accepted position was along the lines that although applicable, the principle should be applied rather loosely in the Arctic regions. In 1921, talks were held between representatives of Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom and it was decided to move towards the goal of incorporating the whole Antarctic continent within the British Empire, but to do so surreptitiously in order not to attract undue attention from the French.32 Britain retained the goal of acquiring the whole Antarctic continent until at least 1928.33 Britain’s post-­1918 policy of Antarctic imperialism was able to build on two foundation stones that had already been laid. The UK had in 1908 and 1917 issued Letters Patent that established the Falkland Islands Dependencies, encompassing Graham Land on the Antarctic continent, as a basis for regulating whaling in the South Atlantic. In fact, in diplomatic correspondence dated 16 May 1906 in response to a Norwegian query, the United Kingdom had stated inter alia that it regarded Graham Land as a Dependency of the Falkland Islands.34 Then in 1923, the UK announced the creation of the Ross Dependency by Order in Council, to be administered by the Governor of New Zealand,35 and by Order in Council of 7 February 1933 established the Australian Antarctic Territory.36 By French decree in 1924 Adélie Land was made an administrative dependency of Madagascar;37 and Norway issued a Royal Proclamation on 14 January 1939 bringing Queen Maud Land under Norwegian sovereignty.38 If Chile and Argentina were to play by the rules and procedural norms of the second wave of imperialism – particularly discovery, effective occupation and informing other colonising states of their claims – they were, as the latecomers to the claim-­making process, likely to be at a disadvantage.39 Chile issued a decree in 1940 defining the Chilean Antarctic Territory as lying between longitudes 53 and 90⁰W and Argentina claimed the area between 25⁰W and 74⁰W in 1943. Nevertheless, both countries rejected Britain’s ­proposal for the case to be adjudicated by the International Court of Justice. Superficially, then, the South American states at this stage might appear to have been engaged in a process of expansion onto the Antarctic continent, along the lines of European colonial expansion into Africa. Upon closer examination, however, there was a fundamental difference. Chile and Argentina each came into being as states with the understanding that they were inheriting rights to a portion of territory extending to the South Pole. As Child has written, ‘Argentina’s Antarctic claims “conceptually” go back to the 1810 date of independence from Spain, and any subsequent decrees or laws that laid out specific claim limits were merely formal attempts to refine the 1810 rights of Argentina.’40 Chile and Argentina believed that it was the UK that was involved in imperialism on the

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 41

21/12/2016 10:11

42  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Antarctic Peninsula.41 So far, the Soviet Union had not made a territorial claim. However, in 1950 it demanded to be included in any international settlement of the question, Soviet jurists describing effective occupation as ‘an imperialistic device used by the capitalist states for the capture of foreign territories’.42

THE THIRD WAVE OF ANTARCTIC IMPERIALISM The United States was the leading power during the third wave of Antarctic i­ mperialism, which can be dated from the end of World War Two. The US was itself, of course, a former colony. France and Britain had been colonial rivals in the seventeenth and ­eighteenth centuries; the colonisation of what was to become the United States was part of that era and the emergence of the US had represented a process of decolonisation. By the late nineteenth century the US had become a world power. Although the US dabbled in classical imperialism as per the British model, with its colonization of the Philippines, for example, it eschewed a formal empire. The United States may have rejected a formal empire, but integral to its rise to global hegemony in the twentieth century was the development of a vast informal empire. Key to this has been international law, which has expanded exponentially during the US era. Countries have negotiated with the US, via international law, to coordinate policy on a wide range of topics. The upshot of this process has been that the US has influenced the policy choices of other nation states far more than they have been able to impact the law and policy of the United States. In other words, the US has used international law to increase its relative influence over others – its power.43 Yet the US has made much rhetorical mileage out of being ‘anti-­colonial’, and this may well have been, at least in part, why the United States Government has never made a formal claim to Antarctic territories. Since 1934 the US has not recognised the Antartic territorial rights of other states, while reserving its own rights.44 Although between the ­mid-­1930s and the beginning of the International Geophysical Year in 1957–58 the United States encouraged its nationals to make claims on behalf of the country,45 the United States continued to refrain from articulation of a claim.46 The United States Government focused instead on science, in the name of which it established a base at the geographic South Pole that served as a ‘marker of American national and ideological strength’.47 Given that during the second wave of imperialism bases and their placement were of legal significance as evidence of effective occupation, the American base could also be interpreted as symbolic of the geographical scale of United States’ Antarctic geopolitical ambition. Meanwhile, the United States explored possible international solutions to the issue of contested Antarctic sovereignty. Argentina and Chile proved the most challenging to accommodate. Bilateral talks in 1941 and 1946 failed to resolve their boundary issue, but the idea of an ‘American’ Antarctic had taken a strong hold.48 The Southern Cone countries, while retaining their differences, both opposed what they regarded as ­Anglo-­American imperialism.49 This stance can be readily understood when viewed in light of the definition offered by Ninkovich, that ‘imperialism exists when an important aspect of a nation’s life is under the effective control of an outside power’.50 Chile and Argentina perceived their territory in Antarctica as integral to their nation: they

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 42

21/12/2016 10:11

Three waves of Antarctic imperialism  43 c­ onsidered themselves to have ‘rights’ to portions of Antarctica in contrast to the ‘claims’ of the second wave imperialists. Argentina and Chile were by no means passive recipients of a US-­led Antarctic colonial project. It was the Chilean law professor Julio Escudero Guzman, an Antarctic adviser to the Foreign Ministry, who suggested a scheme under which all sovereignty claims would be suspended for a five-­to ten-­year period, during which time the countries concerned could better appraise their interests. Chilean officials presented the plan to Caspar Green of the US State Department when he visited the Southern Capitals in July 1948,51 and proceeded to circulate it to the governments involved, even before the State Department had embraced the formula.52 As is well known, the Escudero formula, by which all sovereignty claims were placed on hold, became the basis of Article IV of the Antarctic Treaty. It suited the USA well, institutionalising freedom of movement around the continent in a way somewhat analogous to the freedom of the high seas later recognised by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, while at the same time strengthening the relative position of the United States should the sovereignty question ever be resolved on the basis of discovery and effective occupation. As the dominant power of the day, the USA understandably instigated a legal regime that served its own interests, particularly in relation to the previous wave of Antarctic colonialism, using the rhetoric of universal science as justification. Interestingly enough, Van der Lugt in 1997 dismissed the relevance to Antarctica of hegemonic stability theory, which assumes that hegemonic states establish regimes as instruments of their power, on the basis that the Treaty was ‘a negotiated, rather than an imposed agreement’.53 But here was the cleverness of the United States’ approach: it effectively superseded the previously dominant colonial regime without needing to defeat that regime. Rather than play the game according to the rules of the second wave of Antarctic imperialism, the United States had established a different game, in which it would wield power through a multilateral arrangement. To be sure, the US would not acquire sovereignty through this mechanism, but it stood to enjoy many of the benefits usually associated with statehood and, given the enormous expense of scientific endeavour, the fact that the multilateral arrangement was geared towards facilitating science, in practice worked in favour of the superpowers. Participants at the 1959 conference, which gave rise to the Antarctic Treaty, did not rule out exploitation of the continent’s natural resources, but viewed science as a means of assisting in utilising the continent as a possible source of food supplies or other valuable resources, and US officials recognised that gathering scientific knowledge in Antarctica would possibly lead directly or indirectly to the enhanced military importance of the continent.54 The Belgian representative even spoke in terms of the ‘development’ of Antarctica.55 Like the British Foreign Office in the 1920s, US officials in the 1940s and 1950s tended to assume that any territory must have some value, whether the benefits were realised then or at some point in the future; colonialism was a means of acquiring access to natural resources desired in greater abundance than is available in the home territory. The fact that the Antarctic Treaty was of disproportionate value to the US in comparison with its prior legal position was not lost on the other states with Antarctic interests. Soviet jurists of the 1950s regarded the convening of an Antarctic conference as a ‘fig leaf to cover the American imperialists’ design to seize the whole of the Antarctic’.56 The Argentines almost did not ratify the Treaty because of the anger felt at ‘giving away’ their

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 43

21/12/2016 10:11

44  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Antarctic rights.57 Although during the early decades of the ATS Chileans were realistic that they were unlikely ever to exercise sole sovereignty over their asserted Antarctic territory, they held on strongly to their historical and ‘natural’ continuity with Antarctica;58 in the language of postcolonialism, they continued their resistance – albeit peacefully – to the subsequent imperialist waves. South American geopolitical thinking flourished, emphasising a special relationship between the South America and the Antarctic quadrant directly to its south, based in part on close proximity – it is only 1000 km across the Drake Passage – and geological continuity.59 Both Argentine and Chilean schoolchildren were taught that their countries were tri-­continental: mainland, Antarctic and insular, linked respectively by the Argentine or Chilean Seas.60 During the 1980s the concept of an Ibero-­American sector took hold in Latin America and Spain. Argentina and Chile have claims within this sector, between 0° and 90° West, but other Latin countries – Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Peru, Spain, and Uruguay – have also established presences there.61

WHAT DOES A THREE-­STAGE IMPERIAL LENS CONTRIBUTE TO THE PRE-­TREATY HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ANTARCTICA? The most basic implication of viewing the pre-­Treaty international political history of Antarctica in terms of three waves of Antarctic imperialism is to approach the history by examining the structures and processes of power and their evolution. Looking at the political background to the Antarctic Treaty through this lens enables us to look with fresh eyes at the mainstream English-­language account of that history and to interrogate the assumptions underpinning that account that are so often taken for granted. In ­particular it points to the site of that power during each successive wave – and to the degree and form of resistance. Integral to each of the three waves were shared assumptions and rules that superceded what went before and that functioned in the interests of the leading imperial power. The first wave is often left out of the English language literature on Antarctica, or else aspects of it are included but without a conception of this period as a wave in its own right; it tends to feature more prominently in the literature emanating from South America. The papal bulls can easily be read as historical artefacts with little contemporary relevance. The historiographical interpretation outlined above, however, draws a distinction between the existence of sovereignty and its extent, a distinction that is not always drawn (although theoretically it certainly should be).62 That the second wave engendered resistance reinforces the fact that since decolonisation the South American claimants had assumed that their territory extended to the South Pole; this was captured by Guzman when he contrasted the ‘claims’ of other countries to the ‘rights’ of Chile.63 The interpretation presented here differs from that of Howkins,64 who views Chile and Argentina as having engaged in imperialism; interestingly, Howkins’s definition of imperialism does not ­incorporate resistance.65 The third wave of Antarctic imperialism, formalised in the Antarctic Treaty, did not provoke an anti-­imperial reaction from the second wave claimants, in large measure because of the ‘legal fiction’ that their rights were to be left untouched by the Treaty. Hence, perhaps, the Soviet perception noted above, that the Treaty was an ­Anglo-­American imperial project. Even the most neutrally couched English-­language accounts of the territorial

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 44

21/12/2016 10:11

Three waves of Antarctic imperialism  45 dispute underlying the Treaty serve to make the position of Argentina and Chile sound weak. It is worth quoting an example at some length in order to underline this point: In the early part of the 20th century a number of states asserted claims to part of the Antarctic continent. The United Kingdom claimed the area between 20ºW and 80ºW in 1908, confirming this as the Falkland Islands Dependencies in 1917. New Zealand laid claim to the Ross Dependency, from 160ºE to 150ºW in 1923, followed by Australia which claimed the area between 45ºE and 136ºE and 142ºE to 160ºE. In between the Australian sectors, the French has earlier [sic] claimed Adélie Land as lying between 136ºE and 142ºE in 1924. Norway followed by claiming the area between 20⁰W and 45ºE but with no defined northern or southern limits. In 1940 Chile claimed the area between 53ºW and 90⁰W as Territorio Chileno Antártico, while Argentina claimed the area between 25ºW and 74ºW as Antártida Argentina in 1943. Both these claims overlapped with the British claim.66

An account such as this cannot but help leave a sense that Chile and Argentina were trying to jump on board a process that was largely complete before their interjection. Even for the second wave imperialists, Article IV left them in the difficult position of needing to ‘service’ their claim if they were to have any hope of it remaining intact in the event that the system broke down, while functioning within a system that did not accord them the rights and benefits usually associated with sovereignty. Australia has been one of the most assertive of the second wave ‘claimant states’ in endeavouring to uphold its sovereignty; New Zealand has been perhaps the least assertive. Claimant states have been placed in an awkward position. As sovereign states it would be expected that they would legislate to regulate activities within their territory. But it would also be anticipated that others, including the imperial power, might not respect those regulations. If the claimant then moved to enforce its legislation, the state not recognising the sovereignty of the claimant might well protest and seek to subject the matter to third party dispute resolution.67

Just as Soviet writers dubbed the United States leadership towards the Antarctic Treaty as imperialism, so in 1982 did Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahatir bin Mohamad famously refer to the Antarctic Treaty arrangements as outdated and colonialist.68 The ATS responded by effectively ‘co-­opting’ the post-­colonial critics, to use the language of Dodds,69 just as the United States had largely co-­opted its potential critics in establishing the Antarctic Treaty.

CONCLUSIONS The political background to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty has by now been fairly well rehearsed in the Antarctic literature, although this very fact presents opportunities for scholarly review of the leading historiographical interpretations, and the possibility for renewal. Application of a post-­colonial lens to the international political history of Antarctica facilitates identification of patterns of domination and resistance. The approach adopted here has emphasised the temporal as well as the substantive complexity of analysing empire: most basically, who may be the hegemon in one era or in relation to one object, may not be the same mere decades later, particularly in another context. The shift in hegemons can at the same time be understood as defining the context within which Antarctic affairs have been conducted; examining the political history of Antarctica

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 45

21/12/2016 10:11

46  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica through this lens helps the researcher to identify some of the more subtle means through which power relations have been conducted in relation to the Antarctic continent. This chapter has drawn a distinction between ‘rights’ and ‘claims’. ‘Claims’ are integral to the colonial project and, as applied during the era of ‘new imperialism’ of the late ­nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they constituted a vehicle by which to allocate portions of non-­European territory among the European colonising states. Argentina and Chile, on the other hand, believed that they had inherited rights to portions of Antarctica at independence – which had derived from an earlier period of European colonialism – and therefore did not initially perceive the need to go through the somewhat contrived process of establishing and signalling claims to the second wave of European colonisers. Once it became apparent that their rights were not to be recognised, they undertook ‘claim-­making’ activities but were then perceived as latecomers in the process. The United States, which was aware that it had neither strong claims nor rights in Antarctica, exercised its hegemonic leadership through establishing a regime that did not deny the claims or rights of others, but did not uphold them either, hence giving the United States its desired freedom of access to the continent. Understanding Antarctic geopolitical history in terms of three waves of Antarctic imperialism helps explain the Antarctic identities of the nations and states involved as well as opening a window through which acts of resistance in Antarctic history can be seen. This brings us briefly, and in closing, to the question of the contemporary and future ­significance of historiographical review. Antarctica is being increasingly encroached upon by the forces of globalisation and the continent’s politics impacted by the rise of Asia. Despite many developing countries having become Consultative Parties to the Antarctic Treaty, scholars from those countries, even if not the governments themselves, tend to remain critical of the ATS precisely because they believe themselves disadvantaged by the power relationships incorporated therein. A post-­colonial perspective on the ­historiography of the international politics of Antarctica prompts us to consider the p ­ ossibility – welcome or unwelcome depending on one’s view of current arrangements – that the present regime of political and legal arrangements for Antarctica may not be the last.

NOTES   1.   2.   3.  4.   5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Collis 2010, 387. See, inter alia, Chaturvedi 2013; Collis and Stevens 2007; Dodds 2006; Roberts 2011; Scott 2011. Cullen, Ryan, and Winders 2013, 509. ‘While the trusteeship system of the United Nations was established primarily “for the development of peoples, not penguins”, there is nothing in the Charter excluding the application of a trusteeship to ­uninhabited areas.’ Policy Planning Staff 1948, 981. See for example Howkins 2008, 600. Bush 2006, 1–2. Beck 1983a, 454. Dodds 2006. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2007, 60; Dodds 2006, 60. Hart 2008, 171. Ninkovich 2001, 5. Chaturvedi 2013. Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 15. Green and Dickason 1989, 4. Green and Dickason 1989, 7.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 46

21/12/2016 10:11

Three waves of Antarctic imperialism  47 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

Hunter Christie 1951, 164. Bushnell and Macaulay 1988, 24. Woolsey 1931, 324. Auburn 1982, 49. ‘Supreme Decree No. 3,310 Granting a Fishing Concession to Pedro Pablo Benavides (extract)’, 31 December 1902, in Bush 1982 (2), 289–90. ‘Decree No. 3,073 Authorising the Argentine Meteorological Office to Take over the Meteorological Station on the South Orkney Islands’, 2 January 1904, in Bush 1982 (2), 550–51. Commentary on ‘Memorial of the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs Reporting Discussions with Argentina on Antarctic Territories’ in Bush 1982 (2), 301–2. Howkins 2006. Notes to ‘Chilean Note to Argentina giving further details of the bases of Chilean claims and inviting Argentine authorities to take part in discussions in Santiago de Chile’, 3 December 1940, in Bush 1982 (2), 319–20; and ‘Joint declaration of Argentina and Chile concerning the South American Antarctica’ 12 July 1947, in Bush 1982 (1), 639–40. Barraclough 1964, 62. Lindley 1926, 159. Tønnessen and Johnsen 1982. Lindley 1926, 4. Articles 34 and 35, ‘General Act of the Conference of Berlin, relative to the Development of Trade and Civilization in Africa; the free Navigation of the Rivers Congo, Niger, &; the Suppression of the Slave Trade by Sea and Land; the occupation of Territory on the African Coasts, & Signed at Berlin, 26 February 1885’ in Hertslet 1909, 484. Hart 2008, 225. Beck 1983a. Amery, L.S. (Secretary of State for the Colonies) 6 February 1920. Draft of Minute to Governor Generals in Australia and New Zealand, 6 February 1920. The National Archives of the United Kingdom, CO 532/160 and FO 371/4328/197912. R.H. Campbell (First Secretary, Colonial Office), quoted in Beck 1983a (2), 421. ‘British Note to Norway in reply to the Norwegian Enquiry Concerning the Sovereignty of Certain Antarctic Territories’, 16 May 1906, in Bush 1988, 240–41. ‘Order in Council under the British Settlements Act, 1887 (50 & 51 VICT.C.54), providing for the government of the Ross Dependency’, 30 July 1923, in Bush 1988, 44–5. ‘Order in Council placing certain territory in the Antarctic Seas under the authority of the Commonwealth of Australia’, 7 February 1933, in Bush 1982 (2), 142–3. ‘Decree attaching French Antarctic territories to the government general of Madagascar’, 21 November 1924, in Bush 1982 (2), 494. ‘Royal Proclamation defining the area of Norwegian sovereignty in Antarctica’, 14 January 1939, in Bush 1988, 149. The United Kingdom dated its discovery of any territory in the Falkland Islands Dependencies to 1675, and to the Antarctic mainland, to 1820. ICJ Pleadings, Antarctica Cases (United Kingdom v. Argentina; United Kingdom v. Chile), 11–12. Child 1988, 67. Dodds 2006, 61; Howkins 2008, 598. Toma 1956, 623. Scott 2012. Bush 1988, 420. Bush 1988, 420. Apparently, in 1948 the USA was still considering a claim so as to leave no part of the area unclaimed, putting the USA on an equal legal basis with other negotiating countries, and safeguarding US national interest. See ‘The Secretary of State to the Embassy in the United Kingdom’, 26 June 1948, Foreign Relations of the United States 1, 989. Roberts 2011, 158. Howkins 2006; Hayton 1956. Kendall Moore 1999, 131. Ninkovich 2001, 5. Kendall Moore 1999, 129. Kendall Moore 1999, 131. Van der Lugt 1997, 227. ‘The Secretary of Defense (Forrestal) to the Secretary of State’, 12 April 1948, Foreign Relations of the United States 1, 972.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 47

21/12/2016 10:11

48  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica 55. ‘Statement by Viscount Obert de Thieusies (Belgium)’, final plenary session, in The Conference on Antarctica. Conference documents: The Antarctic Treaty and Related Papers, Washington, DC: Department of State, 1960, 46. 56. Toma 1956, 613. 57. Dodds 2010, 1. 58. Child 1990, 294. 59. Child 1990, 287. 60. Child 1985. 61. Child 1990. 62. Auburn 1982, 5. 63. Kendall Moore 1999, 129. 64. Howkins 2008. 65. Howkins (2008, 598) defines imperialism as ‘the assertive actions of a dominant power’. 66. Allcock 1992, 606–7. 67. Scott 2011, 58–9. 68. Abbink 2009, 160. 69. Dodds 2006, 65.

REFERENCES Abbink, P. 2009. Antarctic Policymaking and Science in The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany (1957–1990). Groningen: University of Groningen. Allcock, J.B. 1992. Border and Territorial Disputes (3rd edn). Essex: Longman. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. 2007. Post-­Colonial Studies. The Key Concepts (2nd edn). London: Routledge. Auburn, F.M. 1982. Antarctic Law and Politics. London: C. Hurst. Barraclough, G. 1964. An Introduction to Contemporary History. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. Beck, P. 1983a. Securing the dominant ‘place in the wan Antarctic sun’ for the British Empire: the policy of extending British control over Antarctica. Australian Journal of Politics and History 29(3): 448–61. Beck, P. 1983b. British Antarctic Policy in the early 20th century. Polar Record 21(134): 475–83. Bush, W.M. (ed.) 1982. Antarctica and International Law. A Collection of Inter-­State and National Documents (vols 1 and 2). London: Oceana. Bush, W.M. (ed.) 1988. Antarctica and International Law. A Collection of Inter-­State and National Documents (vol. 3). London: Oceana. Bush, B. 2006. Imperialism and Postcolonialism. Harlow: Pearson Longman. Bushnell, D. and Macaulay, N. 1988. The Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Chaturvedi, S. 2013. India and Antarctica: towards post-­colonial engagement. Pages 50–74 in Brady, A.-­M. (ed.). The Emerging Politics of Antarctica. Milton Park: Routledge. Child, J. 1985. South American geopolitical thinking and Antarctica. International Studies Notes 11(3): 23–8. Child, J. 1988. Antarctica and South American Geopolitics. Frozen Lebensraum. New York: Praeger. Child, J. 1990. ‘Latin lebensraum’: the geopolitics of Ibero-­American Antarctica. Applied Geography 10: 287–305. Collis, C. 2010. Critical legal geographies of possession: Antarctica and the International Geophysical Year 1957–1958. GeoJournal 75: 387–95. Collis C. and Stevens, Q. 2007. Cold colonies: Antarctic spatialities at Mawson and McMurdo stations. Cultural Geographies 14: 234–54. Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume I: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Cullen, D., Ryan, J. and Winders, J. 2013. Postcolonialism. Pages 508–23 in Johnson, N.C., Schein, R.H. and Winders, J. (eds). The Wiley-­Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography. Chichester: John Wiley. Dodds, K.J. 2006. Post-­colonial Antarctica: an emerging engagement. Polar Record 42(220): 59–70. Dodds, K.J. 2010. Amongst the palm trees: ruminations on the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. Polar Record 46(236): 1–2. Green, L.C. and Dickason, O.P. 1989. The Law of Nations and the New World. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Hart, J. 2008. Empires and Colonies. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Hayton, R.D. 1956. The ‘American’ Antarctic. American Journal of International Law 50(3): 583–610.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 48

21/12/2016 10:11

Three waves of Antarctic imperialism  49 Hertslet, E. 1909. The Map of Africa by Treaty (3rd edn, revised and completed to the end of 1908 by R.W. Brant and H.L Sherwood). London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. Howkins, A. 2006. Icy relations: the emergence of South American Antarctica during the Second World War. Polar Record 42(221): 153–65. Howkins, A. 2008. Reluctant collaborators: Argentina and Chile in Antarctica during the International Geophysical Year, 1957–58. Journal of Historical Geography 34: 596–617. Hunter Christie, E.W. 1951. The Antarctic Problem. An Historical and Political Study. London: George Allen and Unwin. Kendall Moore, J. 1999. Tethered to an iceberg: United States policy toward the Antarctic, 1939–1949. Polar Record 35(193): 125–34. Lindley, M.F. 1926. The Acquisition and Government of Backward Territory in International Law. London: Longmans. Ninkovich, F. 2001. The United States and Imperialism. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Policy Planning Staff, 1948. Antarctica. The Problem. Foreign Relations of the United States 1. Roberts, P. 2011. The European Antarctic. Science and Strategy in Scandinavia and the British Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Scott, S.V. 2011. Ingenious and innocuous? Article IV of the Antarctic Treaty as imperialism. The Polar Journal 1(1): 51–62. Scott, S.V. 2012. International Law, US Power: The United States Quest for Legal Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Toma, P.A. 1956. Soviet attitude towards the acquisition of territorial sovereignty in the Antarctic. American Journal of International Law 50: 611–26. Tønnessen, J.N. and Johnsen, A.O. (trans. R.I. Christophersen). 1982. The History of Modern Whaling. London: C. Hurst and Co. Van der Lugt, C. 1997. An international environmental regime for the Antarctic: critical investigations. Polar Record 33(186): 223–38. Woolsey, L.H. 1931. Boundary disputes in Latin-­America. American Journal of International Law 25(2): 324–33.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 49

21/12/2016 10:11

4. 

Post-­colonial Antarctica

Klaus Dodds and Christy Collis

Shortly after Dodds published an essay in Polar Record entitled ‘Post-­ colonial Antarctica: an emerging engagement’, leading postcolonial theorists posited the ‘The end of post-­colonial theory?’ in the journal PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association). Lambasting postcolonial theory as irrelevant, parochial and ­Anglo-­centric,1 their piece captured a powerful current of discontent. But for Robert Young, a leading theorist of post-­colonialism and author of field-­setting introductions to postcolonial theory and practice, such an obituary seemed out of place and time. As Young opined in a lengthy essay titled ‘Postcolonial remains’ published in New Literary History in 2012: The desire to pronounce postcolonial theory dead on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that its presence continues to disturb and provoke anxiety: the real problem lies in the fact that the postcolonial remains. Why does it continue to unsettle people so much? The aspiring morticians of the postcolonial concur in scarcely relating it to the world from which it comes from and for which it claims to speak: that outside Europe and North America.

As this debate suggests, postcolonialism is a wide-­ranging and dense academic field, with theoretical and practical but also political agendas – including whether to use either postcolonial (denoting an academic field) or post-­colonial, where the latter usually refers to the formal ending of imperial rule. Postcolonial thinking, however, posits that colonialism and colonial imaginaries and practices are as relevant as ever and that scholars need to remain attentive to spatial and temporal variations around the globe.2 Antarctica merits attention in that regard. This chapter explores how postcolonial perspectives have informed and indeed contributed to ‘critical Antarctic studies’, which itself is attendant to the intersection of inter alia colonialism, exploration, race, gender, nationalism, and sexuality. A decade on from that essay on ‘post-­colonial Antarctica’, we would select a different word to ‘emerging’ and propose instead ‘an unsettling engagement’. Postcolonial engagements are unsettling in large part because they posit challenges to dominant, taken-­for-­granted systems of power-­knowledge, and emphasize historical and continuing violence, domination, and inequality. The dominant and privileged position of the Euro-­American world is, as a consequence of postcolonial challenging and questioning, unsettled. When juxtaposed with the colonial experiences of the Arctic, Ireland, Caribbean, Asia, and Africa, the Antarctic and Southern Ocean appear to be outliers in large part because of an absence of an indigenous human population and an absence of race-­based violence. But what postcolonial and other critical scholars have brought to bear in the last decade or so is an insistence that postcolonial ‘unsettlement’ should not exclude apparently remote, empty, and desert-­like environments. The Australian historian Tom Griffiths articulates this well with reference to the Australian encounter, building on the earlier scholarship of Christy Collis and Brigid Hains: 50

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 50

21/12/2016 10:11

Post-­colonial Antarctica  51 For adventurous and scientific Australians of the 20th century, two frontiers beckoned: the white desert and the red heart, the far south and the outback. Adelaide where [the Anglo-­Australian explorer Douglas] Mawson gained a lecturing post in his twenties, was sandwiched between these two frontiers; it was a city exposed to the winds of both deserts . . . Mawson thought Antarctica might become an ‘Alaska’ to Australia’s United States, a new frontier for a ‘young’ nation.3

Mawson’s early-­twentieth-­century musings provide invaluable insights as to how a g­ eneration of Australians viewed the geographical and cultural proximity of the polar continent and surrounding Southern Ocean. They also reveal something of the proprietary nature of that geographical imagination. Unlike the ‘Alaskan purchase’ by the United States from the Russian Empire, however, the acquisition of Antarctica was not facilitated by monetary exchange. Rather it was literally grounded in similarity: regarding Antarctica as if it was a frontier space, albeit without an indigenous human population. The white desert, as Christy Collis noted, proved alluring to Australians already versed in encounters and experiences of the ‘red desert’.4 As Griffiths perceptively noted, Australians past and present have enjoyed, and even taken comfort in, remarking upon the similarities between the two frontiers. As he opines, ‘one claimed by fire and the other by ice – providing vital, formative experiences of the frontier in a settler nation’.5 As Adrian Howkins recalled, the US engagement with Antarctica was also informed and inflamed by a frontier imagination, led by explorers such as Richard Byrd who envisaged a colonializing network of ‘Little America[s]’.6 As Stephen Pyne remarked, ‘Byrd envisaged a society in Antarctica and cast himself in the role of colonizer. He was the first man to consider Antarctica as a site for quasi-­permanent settlement, not simply as terra incognita awaiting geographical discovery or an arena for individual exploits’.7 What a postcolonial perspective offers is reflection on how the frontier is always a project of imaginary and political power. The metaphorical and material power of the ‘Antarctic frontier’ is not something buried in the past; it continues to underpin contemporary manifestations of polar geopolitics.8 We offer two interventions around this term ‘postcolonial Antarctic’ and one that situates itself within the field of ‘critical Antarctic studies’. These interventions signal the analytical productivity of viewing Antarctic geopolitics and discourses through a postcolonial lens. Postcolonial perspectives do not assume the Antarctic to be ‘exceptional’ or de novo. They do not assume that the Antarctic cannot be understood within a broader history and geography of colonialism and imperialism. Postcolonial theorizing co-­exists with other forms of critical scholarship on race, sexuality, gender, and nationalism.9 This chapter’s first intervention addresses settler colonialism(s), which transformed the inhabitation of the polar continent and the exploitation/harvesting of resources, especially in the surrounding oceans and seas. This academic intervention has fundamentally called into question the role of states and associated nationalisms that ‘naturalize’ Antarctic territory. The second intervention addresses the 1959 Antarctic Treaty and Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) as a form of colonial-­scientific governance and questions how it was managed and evaluated in the midst of political decolonization and Cold War geopolitics. The effects and affects are still being felt today in terms of how knowledge claims help manage the continent’s exploitation and preservation while preserving original settler colonialism(s). The final intervention explores interest in Asian states’ involvement in Antarctica, and how that alerts us to how rival knowledge claims, political practices and long-­term a­ mbitions work to shape the understanding and management of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean. What a ‘postcolonial Antarctic’ does is to alert us to the presence

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 51

21/12/2016 10:11

52  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica of what can be termed a ‘polar orientalism’, with regard to Edward Said’s legacy on the legacies of Euro-­American colonialism, which challenges the Euro-­American polar order. The chapter is, thus, different in style and content from Dodds’s earlier intervention in 2006, which did not posit the existence of a body of work called ‘critical Antarctic studies’. Before commencing postcolonial analysis of Antarctica, it is crucial to note that postcolonialism does not necessarily entail a righteous pointing of fingers at ‘nasty imperialists’. The term ‘colonial’ is used a great deal in many different ways. It has been used so widely, and to stand for so many things, that it has become at best a vague pejorative portmanteau for ‘powerful and bad’. With the term so negatively loaded, and so diffuse in meaning, affixing it to Antarctica can seem judgmental. Pejorative judgement is not the purpose of this chapter however. The fact that the states and individuals involved in Antarctica today are not nasty and rapacious does not erase the fact that the bulk of the continent is claimed by a handful of states on the basis of ‘discovery, claim, and occupation’. The fact that Antarctica has no indigenous population makes Antarctican colonialism different from more northern varieties, but it does not diminish it. The point here is that colonialism takes many different forms, and it does not necessarily mean ‘evil empires bent on plunder’. Australia’s massive claim to Antarctica, for example, may have started off in part as a claim to minerals and whale stocks, but it is now focused heavily on ­environmental protection and understanding. The Australian government may substantiate its polar claim by building bases and funding Australians to inhabit them, but this does not make these people mindless dupes of government, or rapacious colonists. Scientists, artists, researchers, and base support workers, as well as government workers, travel to and work on Antarctica for a number of reasons, most of them because they love the place, they are fascinated by it, and they want to help, protect, and understand it. But love doesn’t cancel colonialism. ‘Colonialism’ here then, is used as an objective framework for understanding the geopolitics, territorial division, and discourses of Antarctica.

NATURALIZED TERRITORY: POSTCOLONIALISM AND CRITICAL ANTARCTIC STUDIES Postcolonial scholars, in the main, are driven by a commitment to investigate and ­interrogate the history of colonialism and its aftermaths, and how it persists. Resistant to straightforward-­sounding categories such as the ‘end of empire’ or ‘decolonization’, the ‘colonial present’ (in Derek Gregory’s words) is the starting point for further ­reflection.10 Challenging amnesiac histories of colonialism, postcolonial approaches are in part about recovering and retrieving those histories and experiences obscured by dominant ­accounting and auditing of imperial enterprises, while at the same time sounding a warning that colonial institutions, discourses, and practices are part of the here and now and not confined to a distant historical epoch. In other words, the past is very much in evidence in the present, stubbornly persisting through such categories as hierarchies of knowledge, experience and language, which enable white, Euro-­American, and Anglophone worlds to emerge as hegemonic; even if postcolonial and International Relations (IR) scholars are increasingly grappling with the etymologies of ‘China/Asian’ rising powers and its implications for a post-­colonial encounter shaped by spatial divisions between North and South.11

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 52

21/12/2016 10:11

Post-­colonial Antarctica  53 The postcolonial unsettles by making visible power-­knowledge hierarchies, and encouraging and facilitating the periphery to ‘write back’, ‘to act up’ and take its ‘proper place’ in the making of pasts, presents, and futures. How might such an approach be relevant to the Antarctic, a space not filled with a human history and settlement stretching into the millennia? Some twenty years ago, Lisa Bloom’s seminal text Gender on the Ice brought Arctic and to a lesser extent Antarctic studies into conversation with critical scholarship on gender, race, and nationalism.12 Bloom’s work emerged at a time when a new generation of scholars reinterpreted narratives of polar exploration and exploitation, but also took fresh approaches to the Antarctic Treaty and the post-­Treaty period of international scientific management. Bloom, however, was not the first to use the prism of gender to make sense of the distinctly masculine (and masculinist) encounter with Antarctica. Elizabeth Chipman’s account, Women on the Ice, offered a welcome intervention in that regard.13 In retrospect, we might see this period as the start of a ‘critical Antarctic studies’, as contemporary social science and humanities-­based theorizing was brought to bear on a part of the world that had been defined by appeals to bio-­geographical, geographical, historical, and political exceptionality. A recent edited volume entitled Critical Arctic Studies conveys well something similar in the scholarship produced on the communities, ecosystems, and geopolitical relationships within and beyond the northern latitudes.14 The Antarctic and Southern Ocean were remoter and colder than other parts of the world and were often seen as politically irrelevant because of the ‘political anaesthetic’ applied in the form of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. Using the analogy of the ‘anaesthetic’ is a deliberate one because it implies that the ‘patient’ (that is Antarctica) might well awaken at any time. For some observers, however, the Antarctic was a ‘pole apart’ because, unlike other areas of the world, this was a region apparently characterized by enduring peace, co-­operation, international harmony and even the absence of colonial rivalries.15 Laurence Gould, a distinguished American polar geologist, claimed, in 1960, that the Antarctic Treaty would take its place alongside the Magna Carta (1215) as indicative of human enlightenment.16 These common ‘exceptionalism’ claims have until recently made the application of postcolonial analysis to Antarctica seem irrelevant at best, and at worst, unfair. But Antarctica is part of the world, and in order to understand it, it is crucial that it not be segregated from the complex ideological and geopolitical dynamics by which it is shaped. This notion of the Antarctic being quite different to other parts of the world manifests itself most clearly in discussions about colonialism, settler or otherwise. Critical Antarctican scholars have demonstrated that Antarctica is and always has been articulated to the power/knowledge configurations that shape the more temperate world. One vein of critical polar scholarship, for example, attends to the role of class in Antarctic history and discourse. In the absence of an indigenous human population, the human history of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean has been one largely narrated through the prism of heroic polar and oceanic exploration, stretching from eighteenth-­century maritime voyaging to twentieth-­century sledging and flying over the polar interior.17 It has been one that has concentrated on heroic explorers and what Ben Maddison terms ‘the masters’ rather than the Antarctic working classes.18 Maddison showed that sailors, sealers, and whalers were vital elements to the interplay of polar exploration, commerce, and science. If Maddison brought class and colonialism into conversation with one another, Collis used ­ early-­ twentieth-­and mid-­ century Australian encounters with the Antarctic to

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 53

21/12/2016 10:11

54  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica reconsider how the southern oceanic and polar worlds were discovered, encountered, proclaimed, and administered by men as opposed to women. By examining the embodied performances of men such as Douglas Mawson and expeditions such as the 1929–31 BANZARE (British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expeditions), she makes the case for how Antarctic colonialism was enacted through a series of manly performances on the rock, ice, and water of the far south. Critical Antarctican studies have thus worked to foreground and denaturalize the specific discourses, practices, and knowledge configurations which shape human interaction with the polar south. A postcolonial analysis points out that the legal geopolitics of Antarctica are similarly grounded in existing power dynamics. The bulk of Antarctica is claimed by seven states; of these, five base their claims on ‘discovery, claim, and occupation’. According to international territorial law written during the period of European imperial expansion, a state may make sovereign claim to terra nullius – or, land owned by no one – through standardized rituals of discovery. In these rituals, an explorer must first be authorized by the government to act as an agent of territorial claim. Once that authorized body touches terra nullius, plants a flag, reads a proclamation of possession, and then returns the documentation of that event in the forms of photographs, journals, and maps; the explorer’s state gains inchoate – or partial – title to that territory. Inchoate title is solidified into full territorial p ­ ossession once the state permanently occupies its claim;19 for example, through year-­round research stations. Australia, the UK, Norway, New Zealand, and France base their sovereignty claims to Antarctica on this colonial process of legal territorial acquisition, the same process that was used to transform Australia into a British possession. The colonial law of occupation helps to explain why each of these states has at least one permanent research station in its territorial claim,20 and why some states, such as Australia – which claims the largest ‘slice’ of Antarctica – build research stations only in their claimed territories. Understanding the colonial background of these states’ legal claims to Antarctic territory explains the siting of these stations. Postcolonial analysis, then, points out not only the discursive, but also the legal and the material nature of Antarctican geopolitics. To imagine that Antarctica is somehow exempt from colonialism is to miss one of the ­fundamental dynamics which has shaped human engagements with the continent. The ‘discovery and occupation’ mode of acquisition echoed a settler colonialism already implemented in Australia. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, expeditions criss-­crossing the Australian continent played a considerable role in claiming, colonizing, and inhabiting the coastline and interior. As settler colonists, those white travellers came to stay in environments and landscapes largely thought of as ‘deserts’; not in a literal sense necessarily but in the sense of being thought of as devoid of culture, thinly populated and in need of European ‘improvement’. Settler colonialism involved the creation of infrastructure, institutions, as well as administration and policing – ‘settler sovereignty’. Scholars such as Tom Griffiths have also detected uncanny similarities between ‘interior’ settler colonialism and a polar colonialism. Having attained independence only in 1900, Australia felt the need to emphasize its own national strength (in addition to demonstrating its vitality within the British Empire), and many looked to the Antarctic frontier. Undertaken by men and underscored by a white imperial masculinity, this polar form of settler colonialism was distinctive in terms of the intersection of nationalism, race, and gender, but unquestionably considered possible even in the absence of indigenous native communities.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 54

21/12/2016 10:11

Post-­colonial Antarctica  55 Although we frequently think of Antarctica as a space in which all human presence is transient, as with other forms of settler colonialism(s), these men ‘came to stay’. While the physical environments and extreme climates posed challenges and certainly unsettled expedition life; institution building, ‘improvement’, and later permanent settlement accompanied such ventures. Postcolonial scholarship into the early phases of Antarctic exploration and colonization are buttressed by a revisionist investigation into ‘Heroic era’ exploration and discovery, which considered how the icy adventures of Scott, Shackleton, and others were caught up in a matrix of colonial logics of acquisition and ­administration.21 Resource exploitation in the form of sealing and whaling contributed to making these territories ‘productive’ and even ‘improved’. As Peder Roberts reminds us in his comparative analysis of British and Scandinavian colonial/imperial engagements with the Antarctic, the management of living resources such as the whale was hugely significant not only in consolidating control over the Southern Ocean and islands such as South Georgia, but also in helping to legitimate and justify the Anglo-­Norwegian presence as a managerial necessity – a kind of benevolent administration of non-­human actors and environments.22 It was not until the post-­1945 era, however, that settler colonialism entered into what is sometimes dubbed a new phase, the so-­called ‘permanent era’. Research stations, like the frontier outposts in other parts of the world, doubled as scientific and administrative hubs. Scientists were often asked to perform multiple roles: as researchers, as administrators, and as legal officers. The scientific station, as Collis suggests, became complicit with the colonization of Antarctica and helped to consolidate the presence of those who were either part and parcel of the claimant community and/or others who reserved their rights with regard to pressing a formal claim to the polar continent.23 Shirley Scott notes that the seven territorial claims made in the Antarctic by Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom were based on varying rationales and justifications.24 Argentinian and Chilean polar territories were an imperial inheritance from Spain, which had been granted title by a 1493 Papal Bull that encapsulated all lands from the North Pole to the South Pole, west of the Cape Verde Islands. Geological and geographical continuity and proximity helped to bind portions of the Antarctic Peninsula region to the southern tips of their respective continental territories as integral parts of the nation, as did the bull, which dates from the period of Spanish imperial dominance. By way of contrast, the UK and its former Dominions of Australia and New Zealand (in an explicitly imperial British context) based their claims on prior discovery and exploration; later strengthened by resource management, year-­round settlement, and scientific mapping and research. In the UK context, the establishment of the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS) in 1945 after a secret wartime naval operation (codenamed Operation Tabarin) was designed to use mapping, surveying, and meteorology as colonial modes of governance tied to a network of central ­government departments (including the Colonial Office, the Directorate of Colonial/Overseas Surveys, and the Foreign Office) and institutions (including the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University). Antarctic colonialism, in other words, has never been a continentally homogenous dynamic. As these colonial modes of governance matured, so the Antarctic became ever more measured, collected, dated, and administered. And as such, the claims also became more firmly established as the legal colonies of their claimants: in the Lockean logic of the

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 55

21/12/2016 10:11

56  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica international law of colonial territorial acquisition, surveying and administration of land are core mechanisms of ‘effective occupation’, particularly in the case of land judged to be largely uninhabitable. The seven claimant states and others, such as the United States and Soviet Union, established a powerful modus operandi; a way of framing the Antarctic as a space to be governed through the privileging of science, the work of scientists, and the practices of mapping and surveying, which included radio-­echoing investigations of the thickness of the polar ice sheet. This work did not come to pass straightforwardly however. Recent critical scholarship, for example, on the International Geophysical Year (IGY) 1957–8 illustrates well that this relationship between geopolitics, science, and governance was complex, as interested parties engaged with the rationale of IGY while at the same time engaging in hedging strategies.25 Not one of the twelve participants in the Antarctic component of the IGY assumed that there would be a lasting political settlement after the IGY itself. The mere fact that there were only twelve participants says something about how limited that political-­scientific engagement was with Antarctica in the 1940s and 1950s. However limited that engagement was in terms of the states involved, the Antarctic was being bordered, divided, and demarcated as well as measured in terms of height and depth. The permanent research stations helped to indigenize the colonization of the Antarctic as residents began to live there all year round. As individuals they returned eventually to home locations, but collectively the permanent occupation and inhabitation of the Antarctic was a turning point in the human encounter with this southern polar world. Because their claims were not based on discovery and claim of terra nullius, Chile and Argentina opted for a different mode of colonization, and set up permanent communities in their Antarctic claims. Their colonization included women, children, and schools, as well as the scientists and administrators deployed by the other claimants. As the human occupation became permanent, greater resources were devoted to measuring not just the physical geographies of the polar continent and its seas but also its birds, ­penguins, seals, and whales. The indigenous faunal populations of Antarctica were, as with the aboriginal populations elsewhere in the world, ordered and classified with the aid of investment from states. Viewed through a postcolonial perspective, this ostensibly neutral scientific engagement becomes more complex, and the articulation of scientific practice and ­colonial geopolitics becomes clear.

WHITE PRIVILEGE? ANTARCTICA AS A PROMISED LAND One of the most powerful orthodoxies regarding the emergence and signing of the Antarctic Treaty revolves around citing and siting the far-­sightedness of those who found themselves around the negotiating table between October and December 1959. At play was an intriguing political culture of invisibility and visibility. While the focus was on diplomatic negotiations and the signing ceremony, less attention was given to the element of colonial dispossession. In the opening statements of Antarctic Treaty delegations, the claimant states were quick to emphasize their geographical proximity and historical connection to the continent. What no one dwelt upon was the politics and practices of claiming: the flags planted, the maps drawn, the bases built in the hope of persuading others of the viability of their exclusive claims to the polar continent. As Robert Young

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 56

21/12/2016 10:11

Post-­colonial Antarctica  57 notes, ‘the task of the postcolonial is to make the invisible, in this sense, visible’ and as such as we might ask what can be done to re-­position this pivotal period in Antarctica’s geopolitical history.26 Just before the Antarctic Treaty, the politics of Antarctican territorial possession and influence had undergone a moment of tension: in the creation of the post-­war 1951 Treaty of Peace between Japan and the allied powers, Australia and New Zealand were insistent that Japan be forced to renounce forever any claims to Antarctic land.27 Like New Zealand and Australia, Japan had mounted a polar expedition, but unlike Australia and New Zealand, it had not commenced occupation or formal claiming of specific polar territory. Curiously, Japan had not demonstrated any intention to encroach upon either Australia’s or New Zealand’s polar claims; the vehemence of these states’ stance on Japanese polar claiming seemed to stem more from a colonial sensibility about which states ‘belonged’, and which did not, to the exclusive club of Antarctican territorial possession and control. The Antarctic Treaty conference occurred at a moment of great transformation as European empires were dismantled, and the idea of a ‘Third World’ gained political currency. The emerging nation-­states, some of whom were profoundly altered by partition, such as India and Pakistan, were eager to claim their own space in a world deeply divided by the Cold War. Decolonization was a process rather than an outcome, and ‘emergencies’ in British-­controlled Cyprus, Kenya, and Malaya were significant in the way in which decolonization was performed and staged.28 Frank Furedi has labelled this era (c. ­1945–1960) as shot through with anxieties about ‘white prestige’, a term that well-­known writers such as Ian Fleming might well have recognized as he brought into existence a super-­spy designed to reverse fears of long-­term loss of British vitality.29 Further research informed by archival research and the diaries and memoirs of some of the participants at the Antarctic Treaty conference in late 1959 is helping to produce a more nuanced picture of how the treaty was negotiated, signed, and then presented to the wider world, one that highlights the anxieties as well as the ambitions with which its creators wrestled.30 The public presentation of the Antarctic Treaty in December 1959 onwards mattered because of earlier interest in the political order of Antarctica from representatives of newly-­independent India. Using archival resources in India and other Commonwealth countries, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Adrian Howkins have shown how India’s interest in the current and future status of the polar continent was caught up with broader concerns that decolonized states should engage (and be engaged by others) on ‘big ticket’ issues such as nuclear disarmament, the status of global spaces such as Antarctica and the oceans, and the role of institutions such as the UN.31 Four years earlier, the Bandung Conference initiated the creation of the Non-­Aligned Movement (NAM), with an explicit agenda: on the one hand, to resist Cold War superpower rivalries, and, on the other hand, to agitate and promote for what was later to be termed a new international (political) economic order. India was one of the first members of the NAM. Chaturvedi in particular has explored why India did not pursue a more radical agenda, one that threw into sharper relief the ‘colonial legacy of territorial claims’. When the Indian government expressed a desire to place the ‘Question of Antarctica’ on to the UN agenda in February 1956, it provoked a hostile reaction from Commonwealth allies and claimant states Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. It also found little favour with the two superpowers and semi-­claimants, the United States and the Soviet Union, and other claimants such as Argentina and Chile. India’s UN diplomatic representatives

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 57

21/12/2016 10:11

58  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica and ­political leadership did not challenge the territorial claims per se, as Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru noted in May 1958: We are not challenging anyone’s rights there [in Antarctica]. But it has become important more specifically because of its possible experimentation of atomic weapons and the like, that the matter be considered by the UN . . . the fact that Antarctica contains many very important minerals – especially atomic energy minerals – is one of the reasons why this area is attractive to various countries. We thought it would be desirable to have a discussion about this in the UN.32

The future prospect of experimentation and exploitation was used to anticipate an Antarctic future that was clearly deemed undesirable by the Indian leadership – either as a nuclear test site and/or yet another site for established powers to extract resources. Alternatively, such a resource-­based future might have been more desirable if India was involved with the decision making, especially where it occurred in places that appeared to be on the edge of the world of sovereign states and claims to exclusive authority. Ultimately, however, Britain and its Commonwealth allies clamped down on India’s interventions, and any proposals by senior political figures to relinquish territorial claims were quashed. Although the Indian proposals have received considerable attention, the then leader of the opposition in New Zealand, Walter Nash, offered an arguably more unsettling vision that also deserves scrutiny. In January 1956, Nash proposed that New Zealand should relinquish its claim and posited the notion that the international community should govern the polar continent. Nash’s ballon d’essai drew alarm and criticism in equal measure both within and beyond New Zealand. Up to that point, Commonwealth and American negotiators had been engaged in talks about how to manage their collective interests, and from the British point of view, how it might be possible to encourage the United States to join the claimant club and thus help restrain the interests of the Soviet Union. Nash changed his tune when elected prime minister, instead working closely with New Zealand’s political allies to not only maintain New Zealand’s territorial claim, but also to facilitate US access to the Ross Sea sector of Antarctica as part of the IGY.33 The alarmed response to Nash’s initial suggestion signals the powerful commitment to Antarctica as colonial – and not international – space. Six weeks of intense negotiations produced a short treaty, which used the widely cited Article IV to manage the vexing issue of territorial claims and ownership of the Antarctic. It offered an interregnum resolution: claimant states were not asked to cede their ­sovereign rights, while non-­claimants were not expected to recognize the existence of those claims to Antarctic sovereignty. The semi-­claimants, the Soviet Union and the United States, reserved their rights to make future claims and ensured that access to the polar continent was unfettered by territorial claims. Moreover, the treaty’s area of ­application, Article VI, acknowledged that The provisions of the present Treaty shall apply to the area south of 60° South Latitude, including all ice shelves, but nothing in the present Treaty shall prejudice or in any way affect the rights, or the exercise of the rights, of any State under international law with regard to the high seas within that area. Colonialism is thus enshrined by the Treaty, albeit with the proviso that colonial claims do not have to be universally recognized.

When the Antarctic Treaty parties gathered for their first consultative meeting in Canberra in 1961, it might have appeared that Antarctic colonialism had successfully

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 58

21/12/2016 10:11

Post-­colonial Antarctica  59 evolved into a scientific internationalism. The twelve participants in Washington DC accumulated for themselves an epistemic and legal authority through past exploration, mapping, exploitation, and settlement. They also helped to establish a material culture, which helped to archive and represent that engagement through flags, plaques, sample collection, journals, and photographs. Now they gave themselves a treaty basis for that authority and devised Article IV of the Treaty as a facilitating device, which allowed all the signatories (claimant and non-­claimant alike) to defer their colonial ambitions. These acts of deferral were claimed to be enlightened and far-­sighted, buttressed by scientific and environmental authority. The evocation of ‘political anaesthesia’ seems appropriate in the manner in which it masked rather than resolved underlying tensions and ambitions, and reinforced unequal power relations and patterns of domination, albeit through scientific-­ political and technical discourses and practices. The claimant states – their claims based on either ‘discovery and occupation’ or the Papal Bull – continued to lay claim to 90 per cent of the continent, and continued to enjoy privileged roles as core members of the ATS. Subsequent to the Treaty, there have been no new colonial claims to Antarctican territory, but neither did the original ones disappear.

ASIA–ANTARCTIC ENGAGEMENTS AND POLAR ORIENTALISM With due acknowledgement to Edward Said,34 the term ‘polar orientalism’ is used here to draw attention to how a growing Asian interest and engagement in the Antarctic once provoked (and still provokes) unease from the original signatories to the Antarctic Treaty.35 Australia and New Zealand’s intense efforts to ban Japan from Antarctican ownership, by legal means, points to one manifestation of this unease. In Said’s original formulation, orientalism represented three different things – first, a body of thought and practice produced by western academics, journalists, explorers and governments about the Middle East and South West Asia; second, a mode of thought which invents a fundamental distinction between a modern West and a backward Orient; and third, as a form of episteme that authorizes and legitimates Western control and domination over the Middle East. While Said’s intervention has attracted scholarly and political criticism, sympathetic authors have taken his insights to infer that attention should be paid to how scholarly and political structures enable and constrain understandings of other places, peoples and cultures. One of Said’s critics, Homi Bhabha, offered a rather different view of orientalism and colonial discourses more generally. For Bhabha, orientalism is better conceived as a more ambivalent mode of representation. The colonial view of the native and the colony as interminably backward and primitive is not a stable one. In Bhabha’s reading, the native can also be cast as capable of reform and ‘improvement’. Teasing out the ‘good native’ from the ‘bad native’ becomes, in his reading of British colonial rule in India, a major preoccupation of colonial authorities.36 Colonialism and colonial cultures become defined more by ambivalence and anxiousness rather than by expressions of hegemony and domination. But even to consider ‘polar orientalism’ demands us to be cautious about how terms like ‘rising Asia’ and ‘Asian century’ are put to strategic use. As Jamie Gillen notes,

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 59

21/12/2016 10:11

60  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Relatedly, a last concern with the Asian Century is the term’s clear link to roots in the long established and problematic ontological binary dividing Asia from the West and the Orient from the Occident. Bundling ‘Asia’ as a super-­organic body circulating above the world and driving all manner of patterns of globalization in the current century masks the heterogeneity in and of Asia and packages what is arguably three-­fourths of the world’s population and its biggest land area into one digestible ‘thing’.37

What we can take away from a postcolonial polar orientalism perspective is twin track. The first is to consider further how growing interests from states and regions judged to be largely external to human encounter with Antarctica caused unease and anxiety, provoking a determination by Western states to reinforce their claims to legitimacy and precedence. The second is to investigate further the rise of what we term neo-­colonial powers, originating in Asia and elsewhere in the world. A postcolonial sensibility alerts us, as a consequence, to how power and knowledge are put to work in this contemporary Antarctic context. While the nascent Antarctic Treaty parties managed the Indian interventions in the 1950s, the emerging ATS managed the entry of new members by controlling admission criteria. In the 1980s, amid rising interest in Antarctica’s natural resources and demands for a new international economic order, Asian and Latin American states such as China, Brazil, and India became ever more interested in the fate of the polar continent and Southern Ocean. Within a decade, these countries and others from the global South became Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties to the ATS, ushering in a distinctly new phase of membership at a time of growing interest and attention to the ‘Question of Antarctica’. In retrospect, we can trace what an orientalist analysis might see as a distinction created between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ Asians. The ‘good Asians’ involved what we might term ‘Antarctic Treaty’ mimicry (in Bhabha’s terms) as new consultative parties such as China and India established and populated research stations and began national programmes of Antarctic research. The second strand (‘the bad Asians’) was led by Malaysia, a country that had experienced at first hand anti-­colonial turbulence, known colloquially as the ‘Malayan Emergency’, in the 1950s. Spurred on by parallel developments, especially the signing of the 1982 United Nations Law of the Sea Convention, the Malaysian government explicitly questioned the territorial and resource status of the Antarctic continent. It pointed the finger at the Euro-­American states, which designed and signed the Antarctic Treaty and questioned their political and scientific authority to speak on behalf of a global community. As Prime Minister Mohammed Mahathir remarked in 1983, Where there is some merit in the [Antarctic] Treaty, it is nonetheless an agreement between a select group of countries, and does not reflect the true feelings of members of the United Nations or their just claim. A new international agreement is required so that historical episodes are not made into facts to substantiate claims.38

When it reserved the right to a future territorial claim to Antarctica in the 1940s, Japan was a ‘bad’ Asian state which needed to be legislated into submission through the Treaty of Peace; subsequent to its participation in the IGY and its accession to the Treaty, Japan shifted into the ranks of the ‘good’. From 1983 onwards, Malaysia used the forum of the United Nations General Assembly to raise the ‘Question of Antarctica’. In the 1980s, Malaysia and its allies were particularly

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 60

21/12/2016 10:11

Post-­colonial Antarctica  61 concerned about the status of the mineral resource negotiations (CRAMRA 1982–1988) and the implications for the international legal status of the Antarctic. CRAMRA’s origins were inspired by earlier living resource negotiations in the 1970s (resulting in CCAMLR) and intended to be a forward-­looking intervention designed to provide some ‘ground rules’ for the possible mineral exploitation of Antarctica. Malaysia contended that the ATS, notwithstanding the recent membership of China and India, remained an exclusive club created by a select group of nations which happened to be involved in the 1957–8 IGY and which were now spearheading the development of a mineral exploitation framework. This all served to remind the critics of the ATS that this select group appeared to be taking major decisions on the future fate of the polar continent and in so doing they were excluding many nations of the global South which, in the 1950s and 1960s, were still involved in anti-­colonial struggles and in no position to engage on the matter. Twenty years later, many of these post-­colonial states were still caught up in colonial legacies and challenges. The historic involvement of Argentina and Chile, which secured independence in the nineteenth century, proved how unusual their experience was compared to many parts of Africa and Asia. In 1982, pressure from then-­developing states had resulted in the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea III, which declared the deep seabed – another terra nullius – as the common heritage of mankind (sic). Under UNCLOS III, any revenue made from deep seabed mining must be shared with developing states; the deep seabed was no longer simply available for mining by whichever state could get there first. This anti-­colonial shift of a significant portion of the Earth’s surface and its resources created an unsettling political environment for the handful of states who laid claim to Antarctica and its resources. The ‘Question of Antarctica’, as the framing suggested, sought to unsettle the ‘answer’ provided by the Antarctic Treaty in 1959. It suggested that there was a ‘question’ that still demanded attention from the wider international community. The reaction within and beyond the ATS was, at the time, intriguing. The ATS membership was hostile to the intervention, and strikingly a claimant state, Australia, was charged with representing the ATS within the UN. Another reaction was to question the ‘credentials’ of a ‘tropical country’ such as Malaysia to advocate interest in the ‘white continent’. Such crude environmental determinism was not, however, applied to Australia. Others questioned the motivations of the Malaysian government and speculated on a rapacious attempt to grab a share of the alleged resource wealth of Antarctica. The CRAMRA negotiations invited, almost by their mere existence, such speculation about potential resource wealth. The diplomatic history associated with the ‘Question of Antarctica’ has been addressed and evaluated by the British historian Peter Beck.39 But in more recent years, Malaysian scholars have written on the country’s interest and engagement with Antarctica, including the decision to become a signatory in 2011 after a period of ‘constructive engagement’ with Consultative Parties.40 In 2002, for example, Malaysia was ‘invited to observe’ the ATCM (Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting) and in 2004 became a member of SCAR (Scientific Commission on Antarctic Research).41 Within a decade one of the strongest critics of the ATS had become a signatory, embarked on a national Antarctic programme and participated in the 2007/8 IPY. As with Japan, Malaysia appeared to shift into the ‘good’. Malaysia’s UN campaigning coincided with a different response to the ‘Question of Antarctica’. India and other Asian states such as China were not actively involved in

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 61

21/12/2016 10:11

62  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Antarctic politics and science in the 1960s and 1970s, even if they were concerned with access to the resources of the Southern Ocean and the influence of the region on their weather patterns in the case of the Indian monsoon. However, it is worth bearing in mind that India, as a member of the NAM, was supportive of new proposals in the 1970s to explore how the global community as a whole might manage Antarctica’s resources, as well as those of the deep seabed and outer space. Prime Minister Indira Ghandi reminded her audiences in the early 1980s that the Indian Ocean linked India to Antarctica, as preparations began in earnest for the first Indian expedition to the far south in 1981. India’s first expedition led to the establishment of its first research station and the start of India’s direct engagement with Antarctica. As with earlier European and North American explorers, flags and inscriptions were left on the ice; subsequent interest mounted in being involved with the ATS, as it negotiated living resource management. Indian scientists also began to investigate the geological and meteorological connections between Antarctica and India, and their research proposals echoed earlier work by southern hemispheric states – such as Argentina, Chile, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia – all of which have imagined themselves as ‘gateways’ to the Antarctic and Southern Ocean, as well as being fundamentally connected to those southerly spaces. The ATS was altered when India and China were admitted, with some haste, as consultative parties. The ‘good’ Asian in this context was capable of reform and regulation. The decision to embrace both Asian states was unquestionably driven by countervailing pressures, as the NAM and UN members led by other states, notably Malaysia, pressed for greater accountability and challenged the right of the ATS to act on behalf of the wider international community. All of this was further heightened in the 1980s as the ATS found itself under greater scrutiny and criticism from environmental groups, which took issue with the CRAMRA negotiations. Throughout that decade and beyond, the ATS membership was altered in terms of numbers and distribution by the influx of new members from Asia and Latin America, who were prepared to accept the epistemic authority of the ATS. Ironically, perhaps, China, South Korea, and India’s scientific base-­building programmes have been cause for some alarm by those original signatories, as they increasingly make their presence felt on the polar continent. China has established four research stations and at the time of writing and has plans for a fifth, leaving commentators in Europe, North America, and Australasia to reflect on not only the polar research budgets for Asian Antarctic activities but also on the long-­term implications of this investment. As The Economist opined in November 2013, China is steadily implementing its considerable polar ambitions. Over the past two decades its yearly Antarctic spending has increased from $20m to $55m, some three times the country’s investment in the Arctic. There are many reasons to stake a claim, not least to bolster national pride and global geopolitical clout. The goal of the current five-­year polar plan, according to Chen Lianzeng, the deputy head of China’s Arctic and Antarctic administration, is to increase the country’s status and influence, in order to protect its ‘polar rights’.42

One interesting reaction was to be detected in Australia when it was announced that China had established a station in 2008 at Dome A, an area in the ‘Australian Antarctic Territory’ that was so remote that it took repeated land-­based attempts to reach that part of Antarctica. The underlying reaction appeared to be one of shame and disappointment that Australia was not in the position to claim that particular Antarctic ‘first’. A year

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 62

21/12/2016 10:11

Post-­colonial Antarctica  63 before, the Australian commentators Anthony Bergin and Marcus Haward released a pamphlet entitled ‘Frozen Assets: Securing Australia’s Antarctic Future’, which seemed to coincide with a broader exhibition of what Dodds and Hemmings termed ‘frontier vigilantism’ – an imaginative geography that positioned Chinese, Indian, and South Korean Antarctic activity as worrisome and in the Australian case, threatening to their interests in the Australian Antarctic Territory.43 Under the terms of the Antarctic Treaty and associated legal instruments, such as the Madrid Protocol, the geographical location of research stations is subject to contestation solely on the grounds of scientific value and environmental impact. Claimant states cannot, for instance, object to the construction of a new base simply because it happens to be in their claimed territory. Australia and other claimants have, nevertheless, clearly reacted with alarm as larger states, such as China, have located research stations around the Antarctic in a manner reminiscent of the United States and Soviet Union/Russia – in other words, a form of what we might think of as colonial mimicry or recolonization. China, India, and South Korea all participate in Antarctic place-­naming and use exactly the same sorts of nationalistic, patriotic, and commercial sponsorship and symbols that European and North American states deployed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the Australian media, there is no shortage of articles complaining that the AAT (Australian Antarctic Territory) is vulnerable to this external intervention and that the consensus-­based ATS is insufficiently robust to challenge such opportunism on the part of newer members. The 2014 Australian Senate Committee’s report on Australia’s future role in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean recommended further investment and involvement in the region. The report also reflected on what it termed ‘emerging players’ and noted: Much has been written and said in recent years about the increasing interest of ‘new players’ in the Antarctic region. A number of emerging nations including China, India, Malaysia and the Republic of Korea are rapidly increasing their investments and activities in the region, giving rise to speculation about the nature of their interests, and concern about the declining influence of the traditional Antarctic powers. In particular, the growing profile of China as an Antarctic actor was mentioned frequently to the committee. China joined the Antarctic Treaty in 1983, but its engagement was relatively modest until this century. In the last ten years China has significantly increased its investment in the Antarctic region, including more than doubling spending on Antarctic science and logistics, and building new bases on the continent itself, including in the Australian Antarctic Territory. This has provoked public soul-­searching in Australia with fears expressed that the country was being ‘over-­taken’ and ‘overwhelmed’ by a country with greater infrastructural reach and resource need.44

Alongside other states, such as South Korea and Japan, this contributes to a broader concern of a ‘rising Asia’ gradually becoming more dominant in the overall governance of the Antarctic. The concern over investment, spending, and interests has also manifested itself in debates and controversies regarding marine protection areas (MPA). Australia, New Zealand, the United States and other original signatories to the Antarctic Treaty routinely note their concern about the reluctance of Russia, China and the Ukraine to agree to the establishment of marine-­protected areas in Eastern Antarctica and the Ross Sea. A longer-­standing antagonism exists between Australia and New Zealand and Japan and its ‘scientific whaling’ in the Southern Ocean. Russia and China have been accused of being intent on prospecting for mineral resources, despite the prohibition contained

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 63

21/12/2016 10:11

64  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica within the Madrid Protocol. What is apparent is that the status accorded to the value of consensus in the ATS is changing – in previous generations ‘consensus’ would have been viewed as something to be celebrated; now it is more likely to invite cynicism about how countries can exercise a ‘veto’ and thus prevent consensus from coagulating. All of the above feeds a southerly polar orientalism, which is fundamentally ­suspicious of East Asian states, Ukraine and Russia, and their motivations for being involved in Antarctic and Southern Ocean activities. Aspiring countries such as Belarus (which has explicitly noted the natural resource value of Antarctica) and Iran are placed into a similar category, with their interest in Antarctica deemed intrinsically suspicious. At the same time, claimant states continue to act in a manner that evokes a colonial-­era past, for instance Britain’s renaming of a large part of the Antarctic Peninsula as ‘Queen Elizabeth Land’ in December 2012 in tribute to the Queen’s fiftieth year as sovereign of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth. Other claimant states have long taken an interest in resource management, and sought preferential access to fishing grounds in the Southern Ocean. So while Europeans and Australasians are urged to remain vigilant, we might wonder how unique East and South Asian states are when it comes to shoring up their interests in Antarctica. If anything, those newer members have simply copied the example of older member states; the difference being that their science budgets can now exceed that of the UK (in the case of South Korea), while India carried out its own expedition to the South Pole in 2010. Australia has been particularly aggressive in its territorial management of what it claims as its sovereign oceans in the polar south. Since the early 2000s Australia has vigorously resisted Japanese whaling, not globally, but only in the Antarctican waters that it claims as its own. Under the terms of the Antarctic Treaty, Japan is not obliged to recognize Australia’s claims to sections of the Southern Ocean, and so, in another enactment of colonial mimicry, it treats those waters as unowned high seas and conducts whaling in them. Although it was a whaling nation itself until 1978, Australia has reacted with outrage – both diplomatically and in media discourse – to the presence of Japanese whalers in ‘its’ Antarctic waters. Despite its membership of the ATS, and despite the legality of its polar whaling, in Australian politics and popular discourse, Japan has again shifted into the register of the ‘bad’ Asian states in Antarctica. In December 2013, the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long effected a rescue that offers an interesting concluding vignette. A stranded Russian vessel, containing a group of sailors, scientists, civilians, and journalists associated with the ‘Spirit of Mawson’ Expedition, was trapped in sea ice. The expedition was attempting to recreate the scientific work and travel of the 1911–13 Australasian Antarctic Expedition, led by Douglas Mawson. Previous efforts to rescue the Spirit of Mawson expedition had failed owing to i­ nclement weather and sea ice. Although it was already involved with the construction of a fourth Antarctic research station, the Chinese icebreaker diverted its mission in order to rescue the passengers with its helicopter. The passengers were eventually transferred to an Australian polar vessel and returned to Hobart. What struck some western commentators in the aftermath was that China had effected the rescue as opposed to original Antarctic Treaty members, such as Australia or France. Yet the incident was not unique: three years earlier, a South Korean icebreaker rescued the crew of a Russian fishing vessel, which was operating in the Ross Sea region. So perhaps, once again, we have an outdated perception of exceptionality here, labouring under the misapprehension that

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 64

21/12/2016 10:11

Post-­colonial Antarctica  65 Asian involvement and expertise is somehow unusual or strange in an Antarctic and Southern Ocean setting.

CONCLUSIONS The ‘post-­colonial Antarctic’ as a term draws attention to the colonial histories and geographies that shape polar imaginaries and practices.45 There is no one ‘post-­colonial Antarctic’; rather it is a means of recognizing that colonialism is never fixed in the past, and that the past must be invoked to make sense of the present. As Derek Gregory has noted, a postcolonial approach or sensibility helps us to understand the enduring ‘­ colonial present’, including the role of colonial imaginaries, knowledges and practices. Such an approach also reminds us that the division of the polar continent into seven rival territorial claims and an unclaimed sector is artificial and arbitrary. Colonial powers have worked hard, however, to diminish that sense of being highly artificial by emphasizing their settling labour, and by framing their colonization efforts as objectively scientific. The seven claimants, despite repeated attempts to colonize and settle their polar claims, have never enjoyed exclusive rights or sovereign control. The United States and Russia continue to reserve their rights to make territorial claims in the future, while rejecting all existing claims. Others, particularly China, India, South Korea, and Brazil, have also sought through their investment and research stations and related infrastructure to make their presence felt on the Antarctic and the Southern Ocean. However, while E ­ uro-­American countries have located their investment and presence in longer traditions of exploration, science, and discovery, Asian engagement is more often than not framed in explicitly resource-­strategic terms. China’s research station programme, for example, feeds into a wider canvas characterized by anxieties about China’s investment and involvement with other continents, especially Africa.46 All of which appears breathtaking, given the extraordinary exploitation of Antarctica’s living resources, such as seals and whales, by colonial European powers and the United States. A postcolonial analysis of Antarctica is alert to not only the legacy of the colonial past on contemporary power and knowledge structures, but also to how neo-­colonial powers might be challenging earlier Euro-­American forms of domination. Do the debates and controversies over marine-­protected areas in the Southern Ocean point to competing colonial visions? For claimant states, such as Australia and New Zealand, environmental-­ scientific authority is invoked for ensuring that the large swathes of ‘their waters’ are managed in the name of stewardship and sovereignty. Others, such as China, Russia, and Ukraine, push an alternative agenda, which is eager to control and harvest the Southern Ocean through the prism of resource exploitation while at the same time challenging the dominant Euro-­American conservation/rational use model, as espoused by CCAMLR. The future fate of marine-­protected areas might well offer pointers as to whether it is ­possible to generate new forms of co-­operative and fair ventures in the Antarctic. Postcolonial Antarctic scholars might wish to think further about how the future ­governance of the Antarctic connects with a broader conversation about whether it is possible to imagine, think about, and practice a different kind of politics and governance for the polar continent and Southern Ocean. An alternative postcolonial framing of, and for, southern spaces would be attentive to the enduring presence of dominant ­frameworks,

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 65

21/12/2016 10:11

66  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica while mindful of alternative voices and bodies of knowledge. Geophysical change in Antarctic ice sheets and shifts in the biology of the Southern Ocean can and do play a part in generating new geopolitical concerns and visions, ranging from renewed interest by claimant states to consolidate their resource and territorial interests to non-­claimants demanding that their interests and rights are respected. Tracing out the postcolonial in the Antarctic remains a necessary work in progress, as we reflect further on the different ways in which the politics of the Antarctic manifests itself.

NOTES   1.   2.   3.   4.   5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

Sidaway, Woon and Jacobs 2014. Gilmartin and Berg 2007. Griffiths 2011, 6 and 7; Collis 2000; Haines 2002. Collis 2010. Griffiths 2011, 7. Howkins 2013. Pyne 2003. Imamura 2015. Glasberg 2012; Hemmings et al. 2015. Gregory 2004. Raghuram et al. 2014. Bloom 1993. Chipman 1996. Westerdahl et al. 2015. Lewis 1965; Beck 1986. Gould 1960. Fogg 2002; Walton 2013. Maddison 2014. Triggs 1986. Hemmings, Rothwell and Scott 2012. Glasberg 2012. Roberts 2011. Collis 2007. Scott 2011. Howkins 2009; Powell 2009; Collis and Dodds 2009. Young 2012, 23. Scott 1999. Craggs 2014. Furedi 1994; Parker 2014. Dodds 2009. Chaturvedi 2013; Howkins 2008. Chaturvedi 2013, 312. Hemmings 2012. Said 1978; 1993. Dodds and Nuttall 2015. Bhabha 1994. Gillen 2016. Barber and Selby 1983, 471. Beck 2016. Hamzah 2011. Tepper and Haward 2005. The Economist 2013. Bergin and Haward (2007), and for a reaction, Dodds and Hemmings (2009). Australian Senate 2014. Hemmings 2012. Brady 2015.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 66

21/12/2016 10:11

Post-­colonial Antarctica  67

REFERENCES Australian Senate. 2014. Australia’s future activities and responsibilities in the Southern Ocean and Antarctic waters. Canberra: Parliament of Australia. Barber, L. and M. Selby. 1983. The search for an alternative strategy: New Zealand and Antarctica. The Round Table 288: 462–72. Beck, P. 1986. International Politics of Antarctica. London: Croom Helm. Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bloom, L. 1993. Gender on the Ice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brady, A.-­M. 2015. The emerging politics of Antarctica and what it means for New Zealand. In P. Kennedy (ed.). The Arctic and Antarctica: Differing Currents of Change. Wellington: New Zealand Institute of International Affairs. Bravo, M. 2014. Keynote lecture at the Post Colonial Arctic Conference University of Leeds (31 May). Chakrabarty, S. 2012. Postcolonial studies and the challenge of climate change. New Literary History 43: 1–18. Chaturvedi, S. 1996. The Polar Regions: A Political Geography. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. Chaturvedi, S. 2013. Rise and decline of Antarctica in Nehru’s geopolitical vision: challenges and opportunities of the 1950s. Polar Journal 3: 301–15. Chaturvedi, S. and T. Doyle. 2015. Climate Terror. London: Routledge. Chipman, E. 1996. Women on the Ice. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press. Collis, C. 2000. Mawson’s hut: emptying post-­colonial Antarctica. Journal of Australian Studies 63: 22–9. Collis, C. 2007. Mawson and Mirnyy Stations: the spatiality of the Australian Antarctic Territory 1954–1961. Australian Geographer 38(2): 215–31. Collis. C. 2010. Walking in your footsteps: ‘footsteps of the explorers’ expeditions and the contest for Australian desert space. Pages 222–40 in S. Naylor and J. Ryan (eds). New Spaces of Exploration: Geographies of Discovery in the Twentieth Century. London: I.B. Tauris. Collis, C. and K. Dodds. 2009. Assault on the Unknown: the historical and political geographies of the International Geophysical Year (1957–8). Journal of Historical Geography 34: 555–73. Collis, C. and Q. Stephens. 2007. Cold colonies: Antarctic spatialities at Mawson and McMurdo stations. Cultural Geographies 14: 234–54. Craggs, R. 2014. Postcolonial geographies, decolonization, and the performance of geopolitics at Commonwealth conferences. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35: 39–55. Dodds, K. 2006. Post-­colonial Antarctica: an emerging engagement. Polar Record 42: 59–79. Dodds, K. 2009. Britain and the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. Contemporary British History 22: 43–66. Economist, The 2013. China in the Antarctic: Polar power play. Available at: http://www.economist.com/blogs/ analects/2013/11/china-­antarctic. Fogg, C. 1992. A History of Antarctic Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Furedi, F. 1994. The New Ideology of Imperialism: Renewing the Moral Imperative. London: Pluto Press. Gillen, J. 2016. Some problems with ‘the Asian Century’. Political Geography 50: 74–5. Glasberg, E. 2012. Antarctica as Cultural Critique. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gould, L. 1960. Testimony to US Congress Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in Relation to the Ratification of the Antarctic Treaty (14 June). Gregory, D. 2004. The Colonial Present. Oxford: Blackwell. Griffiths, T. 2007. Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Griffiths, T. 2011. Introduction: Listening to Antarctica. Pages 1–13 in B. Hince, R. Summerson and A. Wiesel (eds). Antarctica: Music, Sounds and Cultural Connections. Canberra: ANU Press. Haines, B. 2002. The Ice and the Inland: Mawson, Flynn and the Myth of the Frontier. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Hamzah, B. 2011. Malaysia and the 1959 Antarctic Treaty: a geopolitical interpretation. Polar Journal 1: 287–300. Hemmings, A. 2012. Considerable values in Antarctica. Polar Journal 2: 139–56. Hemmings, A., D. Rothwell and K. Scott (eds). 2012. Antarctic Security in the Twenty-­first Century. London: Routledge. Howkins, A. 2008. Defending polar empire: opposition to India’s proposal to raise the ‘Antarctic Question’ at the United Nations in 1956. Polar Record 44: 35–44. Howkins, A. 2009. Reluctant collaborators: Argentina and Chile in Antarctica during the International Geophysical Year, 1957–58. Journal of Historical Geography 34: 596–617. Howkins, A. 2013. The significance of the frontier in Antarctic history: How the US West has shaped the ­geopolitics of the far south. Polar Journal 3: 9–30. Imamura, M. 2015. Rethinking frontier and frontier studies. Political Geography 45: 96–7. Keskitalo, K. 2004. Negotiating the Arctic. London: Routledge.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 67

21/12/2016 10:11

68  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Lewis, R. 1965. A Continent for Science. New York: Viking Press. Maddison, B. 2014. Class and Colonialism in Antarctic Exploration, 1750–1920. London: Pickering and Chatto. Parker, M. 2014. Goldeneye: Where Bond was Born. London: Random House. Powell, R. 2009. Science, sovereignty and nation: Canada and the legacy of the International Geophysical Year, 1957–1958. Journal of Historical Geography 34: 618–38. Pyne, S. 1986. The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Raghuram, P., P. Noxolo and C. Madge. 2014. Rising Asia and post-­colonial geography. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35: 119–35. Roberts, P. 2011. The European Antarctic: Science and Strategy in Scandinavia and the British Empire. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rosner, V. 2009. Gender and polar studies: Mapping the terrain. Signs 34: 489–94. Rothwell, D., K. Scott, and A. Hemmings. 2012. The search for ‘Antarctic security’ Pages 1–17 in A. Hemmings, D. Rothwell and K. Scott (eds). Antarctic Security in the Twenty-­First Century: Legal and Policy Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Said, E. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus. Scott, S. 1999. Japan’s renunciation of territorial rights in Antarctica and Australian diplomacy. Polar Record 35(193): 99–106. Scott, S. 2011. Ingenious or innocuous? Article IV of the Antarctic Treaty as imperialism. Polar Journal 42: 51–62. Tepper, R. and M. Haward. 2005. The development of Malaysia’s position on Antarctica: 1982 to 2004. Polar Record 41: 113–25. Triggs, G. 1986. International Law and Australian Sovereignty in Antarctica. Sydney: Legal Books. Walton, D. (ed.). 2013. Antarctica: Global Science from a Frozen Continent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Westerdahl, A., S. Mackenzie and L.-­M. Korber (eds). 2015. Critical Arctic Studies. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Young, R. 2012. Postcolonial remains. New Literary History 43: 19–42.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 68

21/12/2016 10:11

5.  Heroic and post-­colonial Antarctic narratives Nicoletta Brazzelli

INTRODUCTION At the end of the nineteenth century, as European nations scrambled to enlarge their territories all over the globe, Antarctica, too, was seen as a site for future colonization. While the southernmost continent did not initially appear to offer economic or strategic advantages, the development of sealing and later whaling made it more commercially appealing. However, the white surface of the great landmass had always strongly appealed to explorers, while the scientific and technical aspects of exploration reinforced the vision of a ‘manly march’, epitomizing the progress of humanity. Dating from 1895 to 1922, the ‘Heroic Age’ of polar exploration was dominated by British individuals such as Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton, although the Norwegian Roald Amundsen won the ‘Race to the South Pole’ in December 1911. Scott’s final trek represented the apogee of British heroic perception of the South Pole as the blank space, awaiting the imperial and masculine footprints of British naval officers and scientists. Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition was also a scientific enterprise, and scientific research played a crucial role in the history of British Antarctic expeditions and the articulation of the first territorial claim to a British Antarctica in 1908 (and again in 1917), displaying a strong connection between science, geopolitics and empire.1 From the 1950s onwards, the geopolitical context changed markedly in Europe, the rest of the world and Antarctica. The role of Antarctica as an imperial space, in the British (and, more generally, European) cultural imagination, was replaced by a vision of the polar continent as a contested territory ‘governed’ by not only the former imperial nations, but post-­colonial claimant states, such as Argentina and Australia, as well as the semi-­claimant superpowers. At the same time that governance was challenged by post-­colonial states, such as India, in the United Nations General Assembly. The 1959 Antarctic Treaty recognized the status of the seven claimant states and the semi-­claimant status of the United States and the Soviet Union, which both reserved a right to make a territorial claim in the future. Science and peace were the lynchpins of the treaty and over time other countries became involved with this governance project intended to make Antarctica an ‘international laboratory’ and, later, a natural reserve entirely devoted to scientific research. As this chapter shows, the Antarctic has been understood in multiple ways. Once ‘the last place on earth’, Antarctica is now the site where new representational practices and new modes of exploratory and scientific knowledge are developed. The 2012 centenary celebrations of Scott’s expedition show that contemporary perception and thinking about Antarctica is still capable of being associated with the ‘Heroic Age’, while at the same time being implicated in post-­heroic and post-­colonial perspectives.

69

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 69

21/12/2016 10:11

70  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

AN EMPIRE OF ICE At the beginning of the twentieth century, Antarctica was ‘the last place on earth’ to be discovered and ‘conquered’. An exploratory race between the major European nations, such as Britain, Belgium and France, alongside the newly independent state of Norway, took place in order to explore the polar interior and eventually to reach the South Pole. The Pole in particular was imbued with civilizational and patriotic values.2 In November 1911, Robert Falcon Scott began his final march to the South Pole with four companions. While approaching the Pole, on 17 January 1912, the English explorers discovered they had been preceded by Roald Amundsen and his Norwegian team, who followed a different route and used sledge dogs rather than man-­hauling; on their return journey across the Antarctic wilderness, Scott and his companions lost their battle against exhaustion, hunger and the unusually cold weather.3 Their tent became their tomb. On 29 March 1912, Scott wrote the last entry in his diary. Nine months later, a rescue party found the tent; inside were the bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers (the other two, Evans and Oates, had died a few days before), together with Scott’s last letters and journals. Beside the notebooks, there was a camera and two rolls of film. The bodies were left under the tent; a cairn of ice supporting a cross was built to mark the spot. A verse from Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ was inscribed on the cross: ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’. Scott was positioned as a ‘Romantic’ hero seeking the unknown and widely commemorated in the aftermath.4 The collapsed tent and the snow cairn above it sank down into the slowly flowing surface of the Ross Ice Shelf, removing any chance of recovery in the northward moving mass.5 In the British culture of exploration, to which Scott and his final expedition belonged, the explorer who does not return home, but remains in a remote corner of the polar waste that is forever England, becomes a national emblem embedded in an alien and hostile land. Moreover, in places so cold that bodies hardly decay, the explorer’s corpse and his journals constitute both an in situ and a mobile memorial to the endurance of the polar heroes.6 In 1912, the race between Britain and Norway for the South Pole was driven by a combination of geopolitical and scientific ambitions, but also by the imaginative aura of the place. At the same time, according to Chris Turney, the year 1912 heralded the dawn of a new age in our understanding of the natural world.7 Men such as Scott, Shackleton and others embodied the values of the British Empire, but were also scientific observers of a new, extreme and still unknown environment. The Terra Nova Expedition led by Scott enjoyed the strong support of the Royal Geographical Society, an institution in which scientific concerns and imperial attitudes overlapped for much of its establishment from 1833 onwards. The ‘Last Great Quest’, as the Illustrated London News described Scott’s endeavour, was certainly a global media event in 1912. Scott planned his media sponsorship ­strategies before the expedition’s departure.8 When the news of the Antarctic tragedy reached England, the whole nation mourned the dead heroes,9 and Scott was celebrated as the representative of the self-­sacrifice and bravery of a true English gentleman, transformed into a powerful legend of eternal youth.10 As the author of Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie, noted in his famous rectorial address to St Andrews University (3 May 1922), ‘Scott and his comrades emerge out of the white immensities, always young’.11 Thus, a 44-­year-­old Royal

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 70

21/12/2016 10:11

Heroic and post-­colonial Antarctic narratives  71 Navy officer acquires the status of the mythical character of Peter Pan, forever young and cheerful. The 1912 expeditions went to great lengths to disseminate their scientific findings through books, lecture tours, newspaper articles and interviews. This blend of research and exploration was a high point in the communication of the results of Antarctic enterprises. Scott’s adventures fascinated the public because the Antarctic continent appeared as an imaginative site for heroic endeavour, unencumbered by the troubling legacy of imperial exploitation which marked the efforts of explorers in Africa and elsewhere. In a ‘clean’ white space, Europeans could pursue a kind of ‘unashamed heroism’ without having to worry about the reactions of indigenous peoples. Without native populations, Antarctica appeared to offer further unprecedented opportunities for the established colonial tradition of overseas place-­naming. For the explorers, naming a new place stressed the fact that their expedition had been successful and useful as a patriotic act of appropriation and the establishment of ‘priority’.12 Francis Spufford pinpoints the shift from ‘imperial eyes’ to ‘imperial ice’: imperial ice represents a metaphor that encodes the desire for apparently harmless conquest, at the national and individual level. The i­ mperial polar expeditions redefined British identity during the Edwardian era and Antarctic ice constituted a useful accomplice to this imperial ethos.13 The quest for scientific and ­geographic knowledge remained connected with political and strategic factors, especially in the context of commercial exploitation of Antarctica’s waters.14 The ‘Heroic Age’ began in 1895, when the Sixth International Geographical Congress declared Antarctic exploration as the greatest piece of geographical enterprise yet to be undertaken. It ended in 1922, the year of Shackleton’s death, when the interwar period ushered in the start of a different kind of exploratory era, in which airplanes and flight were replacing, in part, the work of sledges, dogs and even man-­hauling. The age ­represents the culmination of a long period of discovery, begun in the 1770s by Captain Cook’s voyages in search of ‘Terra Australis Incognita’, a remote and unknown continent. Defined by Hayes as heroic, because its accomplishments were unaided by mechanical devices such as planes and tractors, this period produced alluring narratives of nature testing human bodies and their minds (particularly by Scott and Shackleton) that still today exert their powerful imaginative grip on writers, artists, scientists, cultural ­historians and the general public alike.15 Britain’s interest in Antarctica was strongly linked to the nation’s imperial ambitions. Captain Cook’s eighteenth-­century voyages were the expression not only of scientific curiosity, but also of the global aspirations of a maritime nation with an extensive imperial portfolio. Scott himself sailed south from Britain exploiting an imperial corridor, moving through South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, before the final dash towards Antarctica. His crew carried the beliefs and practices of an imperial nation to the extreme South. The conquest of the South Pole was of greater symbolic than strategic or commercial value and was meant to mark the expansion of the British Empire to the southern limits of the Earth. The heroic era of Antarctic history contributed to portraying Antarctic exploration as hermetically sealed off from the outside world. The heroic individual, at the centre of those Antarctic journeys, allowed the exploration to be portrayed as a drama of survival in extreme adversity.16 Apsley Cherry-­Garrard, the youngest member of Scott’s Terra Nova team, described Antarctica as a region where the mere grabbing of territory was

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 71

21/12/2016 10:11

72  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica meaningless, but, far from having no real meaning, its contemporary significance lay in what it suggested to the rest of the world about competing colonial powers, and especially Britain’s preeminent role in the exploration and the exploitation of Antarctica.17 The ‘Message to the Public’ Scott wrote at the end of his journals remains the ­cornerstone of Scott’s heroic reputation, but it also perpetuated a view of British involvement in Antarctica which was devoid of other agendas such as territorial claiming and the exploitation of living resources such as seals and whales.18 Instead the leader of the Terra Nova Expedition became a model of idealized citizenship during both world wars, and criticism of Scott’s behaviour did not start to grow until the end of the 1950s. At that time, Britain embarked on a process of self-­examination and suffered external losses of imperial power as well as internal decay. The debacle of Suez in 1956, alongside the process of decolonization, coupled with a general anxiety about an obsolete economic and social system, generated an extensive debate devoted to national decline. At the end of the 1970s, Roland Huntford’s exposition of Scott as an incompetent bungler achieved widespread popularity and remains highly controversial.19 However, several writers and scholars did continue to defend Scott’s reputation from the 1990s onwards, including Ranulph Fiennes (2004) and David Crane (2005).20 Scott’s legacy has undergone changes that interestingly reveal the shifting perspectives of the role of the explorer-­hero and his relationship to the ‘Heroic Age’ of Antarctica. The appeal of the Antarctic expeditions has been intensified over recent years by an appreciation of the scientific achievements of polar exploration.21 The scientific aims of the Terra Nova Expedition, symbolized by the thirty-­five pounds of geological specimens the members of the polar party carried with them until their death, were proof of the apparent selflessness and idealism of the whole enterprise. Likewise, the emperor penguin eggs collected at Cape Crozier and carried back to England by Apsley Cherry-­Garrard were meant to solve the mystery of the ‘missing link’ between birds and reptiles. In addition, photographs, together with maps and charts, played their part in establishing the ultimate proof of the British conquest of the Pole. Stones, penguins’ eggs, pictures and scientific data were gathered in an effort to establish the geological history of Antarctica and of earth itself. Recently, scholars such as Edward Larson, the author of An Empire of Ice (2012), as well as the successful exhibition at the Natural History Museum, ‘Captain Scott’s Last Expedition’ (20 January–2 September 2012), recast Scott as an exemplary figure, focusing on Scott and his expedition’s scientific credentials and legacies. In the twentieth century a range of institutions helped to preserve Scott’s memory. The Scott Polar Research Institute, founded in 1920 to commemorate Scott, as well as the Royal Geographical Society, have played a vital role in celebrating Scott’s public profile. The investment of other key institutions such as the British Museum, the Antarctic Heritage Trust and the National Maritime Museum, coupled with the extensive visual and material legacy bequeathed by the British explorers to institutions such as the British Library, have been notable. On the whole, the great British narratives of exploration of the early twentieth century had an extraordinary impact on the Western imagination. After the Norwegians had reached the South Pole, the Anglo-­ Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton undertook his most ambitious mission and tried to cross the continent via the Pole in 1914–1917 (the Endurance Expedition): he failed, but all his crew survived.22 His escape from the Antarctic may be read as an updated version of the North American ‘captivity narrative’.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 72

21/12/2016 10:11

Heroic and post-­colonial Antarctic narratives  73 Rather than white western women being held by Native Americans in frontier America, Shackleton’s party was being held by a ruthless Antarctica. Their rescue by a Chilean party, after a daring trek by Shackleton and a small group to South Georgia, was widely lauded then, as it is now. Their ‘escape’ reaffirmed the imperial (and Christian) values of strength, endurance and comradeship.23 The dramatization of the southern polar march into the wilderness, leading to its tragic outcome, in Scott’s case, or to a dramatic survival and rescue in the example of Shackleton, shows that the Antarctic can contribute to nationalist tales of masculine and national heroism.24 The interaction between the cultural language of national pride with the clear-­cut exploration of the natural world marks the polar journals of these explorers and scientists as a new kind of literature, where the scientific value of the expeditions is emphasized by the inclusion of appendixes and tables, while the style is anecdotal and overtly rhetorical. While the frozen continent could condemn men to annihilation it also served to reinforce national identity projects, thanks to the creation of powerful, and even captivating, patriotic narrations and associated practices such as formal acts of ­commemoration and celebration.

THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE AND POLITICS The contemporary designation of the Antarctic as the ‘continent for science’ suggests a giant white laboratory with its connotations of objectivity and impartiality, which resonates with the icescape itself.25 The tales of endurance, self-­sacrifice and technological innovation that marked the 1912 expedition laid the foundations for modern scientific exploration. The geographical imagination of Antarctica began to shift from a purely symbolic prize to a region connected to global processes of environmental and cultural change. At a time when competition for onshore and offshore resources places the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) under increasing pressure, the history of the expeditions of the ‘Heroic Age’ reaffirms the interdependence of science and imperial or even neocolonial aims. Edward Larson argues that the British Antarctic expeditions of the pre-­war period were modern and forward-­looking enterprises. They conducted significant research that, in fields ranging from climate change and paleontology to marine biology and glaciology, helped create the twentieth-­century view of Antarctica and its connections to a global system. Although the focus on some of the crucial choices adopted by Scott (that is man-­ hauling instead of using sledge dogs) portrayed Scott as a Victorian character, the British expeditions of the Edwardian age continue to inform contemporary Antarctic science.26 Even after the end of the ‘Heroic Age’ of Scott and Shackleton, the mapping and surveying of Antarctica by the British was far from unproblematic. In 1943–1944 ­ Operation Tabarin, the code name for a secret naval operation designed to raise Britain’s imperial profile in the South Atlantic, was implemented. This was clearly connected with the preservation of Britain’s South Atlantic Empire and predicated by a belief that others were coveting a vast territory claimed by Britain in 1908 and 1917.27 In 1948, the film Scott of the Antarctic, directed by Charles Frend, played a considerable role in recreating the myth of an empire enriched by the ideals of service, duty and sacrifice, albeit one connected with the frozen South. At the time of its release, Britain was still engaged

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 73

21/12/2016 10:11

74  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica in an expensive and dangerous game of territorial occupation, mapping and diplomatic work.28 The zenith of British Antarctic endeavour was the successful outcome of the Commonwealth Trans-­Antarctic Expedition under the Anglo-­New Zealand leadership of Vivan Fuchs and Edmund Hillary in 1958. The crossing of Antarctica was meant to be the high point of British and Commonwealth polar achievement, as men and their machines triumphed against the most hostile natural landscape on earth. By the end of the 1950s, hundreds of thousands of pounds had been poured into land-­ based surveying, air photography, logistical support and base maintenance in order to strengthen British claims to Antarctica once again. The political status of the uninhabited Antarctic continent and its surrounding seas emerged as a significant feature of international politics. The International Geophysical Year (ISY) (1957–1958) pointed out how political interest could be combined with science. National presence, as well as rivalry, was translated into both competition and cooperation in scientific research. Claimant states such as Britain, Australia and New Zealand were forced to adjust to a new geopolitical reality of American and Soviet scientific stations littering the polar continent oblivious to those territorial claims of the first half of the twentieth century. The Washington Conference (15 October–1 December 1959) was undoubtedly a remarkable diplomatic watershed. It created a legal and political framework for future international cooperation in the region. Claimant states had to accept the suspension of territorial claims; arguably the treaty was a geopolitical and legal victory for the British delegation, as territorial claims were preserved for the duration of the treaty. In any case, a huge effort towards international collaboration prevailed in an era dominated by post-­colonial change and anti-­colonial rebellions in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. The twelve parties to the treaty negotiations were the ones that participated in the IGY Antarctic programme and in that sense the timing was favourable. Had the negotiations occurred in the 1960s, it is highly likely that others might have been more demanding when it came to participation and even negotiations over the treaty and its provisions. The Antarctic Treaty was signed in December 1959 and entered into force in June 1961. The two superpowers, USA and USSR, agreed not to let Cold War conflict reproduce itself further in Antarctica. Helpfully, perhaps, the decolonization process had hardly begun. The Antarctic club of twelve nations (Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States) excluded many emerging countries, such as India. The Australian involvement in the Antarctic was substantial in terms of polar expeditions, territorial acquisition and scientific endeavour, and Australia played a key role as spokesperson for the Consultative Parties. On the other hand, Chilean and Argentinian positions were deeply rooted in a combination of historical and geographical contexts, which sat uneasily with the internationalization of the Antarctic.29 Both South American countries believed passionately in their inalienable rights to their respective polar territories. In an attempt to enhance wider legitimacy and credibility, in the 1980s India, Brazil and China were accepted as Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties following earlier signatories such as West Germany and Poland. Other developing nations gradually followed. In particular, India articulated a view that active interest in Antarctica had grown in areas of the world without an exhaustive record of exploratory and scientific achievements. It also, prior to acceding to the Antarctic Treaty, was eager to remind the world that Antarctica was a place of global concern.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 74

21/12/2016 10:11

Heroic and post-­colonial Antarctic narratives  75 The Antarctic Treaty addressed the major elements of the ‘Antarctic problem’ in the 1950s, especially the different attitudes to territorial partition and the potential conflict over the overlapping claims of Chile, Argentina and the United Kingdom in the Antarctic Peninsula. The treaty formally demilitarized the Antarctic continent (and the surrounding ocean) and established a nuclear-­free zone.30 These provisions were supplemented by the development of an innovative regime of base inspection, which was seen as a vital confidence-­building mechanism in the midst of Cold War tensions. The Antarctic Treaty is a security tool and, with its focus on peace and science, offers one of the earliest examples of what is now termed a regime complex. The signing of the Antarctic Treaty in 1959 recognized that in the interest of all mankind Antarctica should continue to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes, and the treaty’s provisions were intended to facilitate that vision. Article IV froze sovereignty positions and thus facilitated the emergence of science as the crucial factor in shaping access to Antarctic space and to its scientific data.31 The treaty protected the political and legal status quo ante. Unlike what happened in other parts of the world, however, it showed that it was still possible for ‘man’ (and it remained a ‘manly space’ in the 1960s and 1970s) to be a ‘good colonizer’. In fact, after it entered into force, all the claimant states continued to believe that their territorial claims were intact and fundamentally unchanged. The Antarctic Treaty parties, like the British imperialists of the past, argued that their claims to scientific and environmental authority were being used in the interests of all humankind. As a whole, the ATS is a multi-­faceted process of international cooperation through which participants undoubtedly accrue multiple benefits. On the other hand, the Antarctic Treaty is a good example of hegemonic power. While acknowledging the old colonial claims, it can be also considered as a gateway to the neo-­imperialism of the USA. The USA had made no territorial claims in Antarctica but was allowed, along with the Soviet Union, to establish bases anywhere on the continent. The provisions of the treaty fitted well with post-­war US interests, which were predicated on ensuring access for their scientists, militaries and businesses to the wider world. The 1982 invasion of the Falkland Islands by the Argentine army revitalized Britain’s determination to maintain an advantage in that area of the world, regardless of prevailing international pressure to resolve a colonial situation. The link between patriotism, nationalism and British identity politics was clearly revealed during the 1982 military campaign, as the then government committed itself to ‘rescuing’ the small English-­ speaking population from Argentine occupation. While conflict also occurred in South Georgia, Britain and Argentina continued to cooperate with one another in Antarctica. As with other claimant states, the UK continues to protect its interests in its sub-­Antarctic territories, and is highly sensitive to how its Antarctic and sub-­Antarctic interests inform one another. Britain and Argentina have clashed with one another over issues such as fisheries management, tourism and air-­links between the Falklands and South Georgia. All three counter-­claimants in the Antarctic Peninsula region have also sought to bolster their sovereign rights to the seabed off the polar continent. Science remains a powerful raison d’être in Antarctica, involving material presences, governance structures and epistemological questions. Since the International Geophysical Year and the Antarctic Treaty, science has supported a human presence and has developed its own vision of the future of Antarctica.32 While polar science appears to hold at bay

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 75

21/12/2016 10:11

76  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica the traditional forces of national and capital markets, commercial sectors such as fishing and tourism are also making their impact increasingly felt. According to Peder Roberts, Antarctic science has always implied a ‘geopolitical performance’.33 Thus, the concept of the Antarctic as a conflict-­free space is clearly challenged, because the establishment of national bases is always an act of competition, a marker of national and ideological strength. And activities, such as fishing, in the disputed waters of the South West Atlantic and even the Southern Ocean have been caught up in geopolitical tension between ­claimant, counter-­claimant and third-­party states and corporations. Antarctica is also described as a ‘global commons’.34 Certainly, it is a special kind of open space, involving several intriguing issues, due to the hardships of climate and the all-­pervasive impact of ice and sea. The terms of sovereignty remain a legal conundrum for both Antarctic Treaty parties and the international community at large. Above all, the Antarctic commons is a unique ecosystem that depends on a fragile balance of natural processes. After earlier conventions designed to address living and non-­living resource management, efforts have been made to establish an environmental protection regime for the Antarctic, with the Protocol on Environmental Protection (Madrid Protocol) entering into force in 1998.

POST-­COLONIAL ANTARCTICA AND FICTIONAL REPRESENTATIONS Antarctica is not properly a post-­colonial country: it has no native population, no ­specific language or culture and its history seems to coincide with the history of European discovery, exploration and exploitation. According to the general perception, today ­ Antarctica is a frozen continent dotted with scientific bases, where scientists from different nations cooperate in the name of scientific research. Alternatively, it is a snowy wasteland, threatening the world as it melts. No longer a ‘terra incognita’, the Antarctic continent is understood to play a crucial role in our planet’s contemporary scientific and environmental challenges, just as it played a crucial role in the first decades of the twentieth century as a space of historic encounter with the immense natural forces of ice, wind and snow.35 Klaus Dodds writes that ‘ushering in a new era of continental exploration and international rivalry, the Antarctic is now as much a symbol of global anxiety, as it is a site of ongoing scientific collaboration and knowledge exchange – snow, ice, and the cold are new geopolitical and scientific front lines’.36 Antarctica remains one of the last vestiges of colonial expression and masculine endeavour; retaining notions of territorial sovereignty that take concrete shape in environmental and scientific activities. New post-­colonial perspectives are opened up by the reinterpretation of the Antarctic past developed in countries such as Argentina and Chile, New Zealand and Australia – that is nations that boast a geographical closeness to the southern continent and have taken part in the Antarctic history of exploration. On the other hand, Dodds stresses the fact that Antarctica has not figured prominently in the literature dealing with post-­colonialism. And yet, though there were no indigenous Antarctic peoples to resist foreign domination, Dodds advocates connecting Antarctic politics to a post-­colonial perspective.37 The term post-­colonial critically highlights how systems of colonial domination, whether in the form of production of knowledge or the

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 76

21/12/2016 10:11

Heroic and post-­colonial Antarctic narratives  77 prevailing geopolitics of international order, persist in the contemporary era. Dodds regards Britain, New Zealand, Australia, Chile, Argentina and the USA as engaged in imperialist Antarctic policies. According to him, Article IV established a pattern freezing the colonial map for the duration of the treaty, at the same time allowing the development of new modes of scientific cooperation among different national communities. The colonial imprint on Antarctica, mainly because of the lack of native populations, created a different context for any debate on colonialism and post-­colonialism. The Antarctic Treaty and the documents and scientific surveys recently produced are a starting point for a discussion on the question of colonial exploitation and imperial ­cartography and their contemporary reinterpretations. By regulating access to the continent, the treaty in a sense controls the views and representations of the Antarctic, shaping its ‘strange geography’. The Antarctic is still divided between old and new geographies, territorial claims and international cooperation.38 However, the treaty provides older imperial nations such as Britain with a prominent role in the international agreements while enabling territorial strife to be replaced by international collaboration. A growing number of countries are directly involved in making the ‘white continent’ a natural reserve devoted to peaceful activities and scientific observations. Antarctica has shifted from a blank backdrop for empire, or even a symbol of purification, to becoming emblematic of an environmentally endangered planet. Antarctica has shifted from imperial registers to environmental preoccupations and seems now to prefigure and announce a universal, global ‘ruin’. In this sense, according to Elena Glasberg, the southern continent is the site and source of a new kind of ‘environmental melancholy’.39 Its significance as a ‘symbol of our time’ goes hand in hand with its being a material place in need of protection, thanks to the efforts of the rest of the world. The ‘master narrative’ of the past is now accompanied by the scientific discourse including the ecological concern and the global interconnectedness of nations and cultures. Antarctica, for centuries the liminal space par excellence, is now the site for the development of new representational practices and new modes of exploratory knowledge. The contemporary process of creating Antarctica through writing is strongly linked to memorialization of the past including the ‘built’ environments of the continent, that is the scientific bases, the bodies of the people moving across or temporarily living on ice. The modern Antarctic novel is fully aware of environmental politics, at least since Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction work The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), in which an alien planet has to cope with a rigid climate, snowstorms and impervious frozen areas. Ursula Le Guin is also the author of ‘Sur’, a short story originally published in the New Yorker in 1982, the fictional report, long hidden in an attic, of an all-­women expedition to the South Pole which is supposed to have taken place in 1909–10, before Amundsen and Scott. Le Guin’s ironic feminist utopia creates an alternative history of Antarctica, though inevitably retracing the same history it critiques.40 Despite popular perceptions of the Antarctic as a masculine environment, women have followed in the footsteps of the explorer-­heroes. The post-­heroic occasions created by women working and living in Antarctica also led to greater reflection on the gendering of science. Antarctic narratives are increasingly about ‘travelling’, portraying personal and geographical journeys, and women have much to say on the matter. In Terra Incognita, Travels in Antarctica (1996), Sara Wheeler focuses on the people of Antarctica, past and present – the way they live now, the way they lived and died in the past, and how they

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 77

21/12/2016 10:11

78  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica respond to the physical and psychological challenges of the most extreme environment in the world. There is a sense that contemporary scientists (what she terms ‘the beards’) carry the baton of the great explorers of the past. Indeed, Antarctica appears to offer direct access to the past, its ice acting as a kind of archive of past ages, while it also points to present and future dangers.41 The passage of time is the pattern structuring Beryl Bainbridge’s novel The Birthday Boys (1991), which deconstructs the myth of the polar explorers from a post-­colonial and feminist perspective, in the process debunking Edwardian male values. The ‘Birthday Boys’ of the title are Scott and the four members of his team, each of whom narrates a section of the story. As the narrative progresses further, the reader discovers that these figures are not great explorers, but frail and anxious men, suffering terrible nostalgia for their mothers and wives.42 If Bainbridge retells and revisits the original events, other texts imagine the future, such as Marie Darieussecq’s White (2003), where the ghosts of the explorers continue to interact with the fictional characters and narrate their own story. In Elizabeth Arthur’s Antarctic Navigation (1994), Scott appears as an icon.43 Arthur chronicles the obsession of her heroine trying to recreate Scott’s doomed expedition, while Jenny Diski’s Skating to Antarctica (1997) is part travel essay, part personal memoir, and uses the phases of the physical journey to Antarctica to trace the trajectory of a woman’s inner life. Diski presents the voyage as an opportunity to explore the inner self: her ‘desire for whiteness’, a real obsession involving white sheets and psychiatric hospitals, is gradually transferred onto the Antarctic landscape. This sense of Antarctica as a ‘place apart’ also means that it can be considered as ‘time apart’, and its various communities can sustain views of new or even different gender roles and societies. Science fiction, on the one hand, points to an ideal southern land, on the other, to post-­apocalyptic scenarios. The ice, acting as a barrier, is able to close and protect (imagined) communities in great frozen inland wastes, never interrupted by trees, houses and animals. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica (1997), the representation of the continent, although de-­exoticized through the advent of tourism and scientific investigation, is deeply influenced by the explorers’ enterprises. Ecological sustainability is a major theme in Antarctica, where a significant part of the narrative arc dramatizes the threat of invasion and despoiling of the near-­pristine environment by corporate interests. On the one hand, the Antarctic exploration can be compared to some future colonization of Mars, because Antarctica is viewed as a completely different planet; on the other, it conveys a model for the utopian or dystopian imagination, shaped by science and technology. If science can control and even dominate the environment, the extreme landscape and severe climate of the Antarctic refuses to be completely controlled, and conveys the idea of an indecipherable and untamed otherness. The connection with the mythical history of the Antarctic (in the romantic tradition of Coleridge and Poe) grounded on the ‘geography of reversal’ clearly influences this vision. The discourse of scientific progress accompanies and legitimizes the ‘Heroic Age’, while twentieth-­century Antarctic treaties and international agreements contribute to building varied scientific utopias and ­dystopias: where people collaborate and yet still compete with one another. In recent years, memoirs, fiction and especially the creative imagination of women has tended to revisit the myths of the imperial explorer-­hero and to challenge once again the stereotypes created by the polar explorers. Women provide spatial images that reinforce the value of their inner experience, as well as of a personal reading of male and imperial

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 78

21/12/2016 10:11

Heroic and post-­colonial Antarctic narratives  79 history. While the scientific reports of the explorers remain the primary narratives about Antarctica, and contemporary documentaries try to bring Antarctica into the circle of the known world, the female literary accounts represent the frozen continent as a place of pure imagination, where women can put aside the problems of everyday life and discover their inner selves, reshaped in a land full of mysteries and constantly changing features. Everland (2014) by Rebecca Hunt, for example, recreates two fictional Antarctic expeditions albeit a hundred years apart. In 1913 disaster overtook the explorers Napps, Millet-­Bass and Dinners on the imaginary Antarctic island named Everland. In 2013 a scientific team flew to the same island. Team leader Decker and his assistant Jess are physically tough and experienced in extreme conditions, while the third, Brix, is a scientist and academic who is far less familiar with the rigours of fieldwork. They set up camp with resources and materials beyond the dreams of the old explorers, but no amount of technology can neuter Everland’s overwhelming physical and social wilderness. In conclusion, Antarctica remains a fascinating and contradictory place: the imperial site of the British cultural imagination as well as the contemporary post-­colonial territory governed both by the former imperial nations and by post-­colonial countries such as India, New Zealand or Malaysia. If we acknowledge the relevance of a post-­colonial approach, the prevailing representations of Antarctica rewrite the colonial age of exploration revisited in myth and memory as peculiarly contemporary attitudes based on post-­imperial values and scientific challenges, mostly related to world climate change and environmental issues. The British Empire made a heavy imprint on the Antarctic map in the form of t­ erritorial claims and also by its long tradition of place-­naming. Naming and mapping, alongside the creation of scientific stations, are still the means for the nations to preserve their historical association with the Antarctic. The contemporary efforts to restore, maintain and promote ‘Heroic Age’ sites (such as huts, place or grave markers, expedition items) remain caught up in this colonizing impulse. Expedition re-­enactment remains popular, especially those following the footsteps of the heroes.44 Notwithstanding the connections between Antarctica and post-­colonialism, the southern continent is marginalized in the academic field of Post-­colonial Studies. As empty spaces devoid of human population, the white southern regions are generally excluded from discussions on the geographies of possession and settlement. On the other hand, the role of science, which has always been central in the colonization of Antarctica, continues to cement and legitimize the human presence on the continent. Science has also enabled countries such as the USA and other English-­speaking countries to ‘dominate’ and keep under their control former colonial states such as India, which do not have the capacity to mobilize scientific and logistical investments, even if the rising profile of other Asian states such as China and South Korea has provoked media and political figures in Australia and New Zealand to express concern about the scale of this newer activity. Therefore, in the case of Antarctica, the post-­colonial context to be considered is broader and more complex than the simple pattern of European decolonization and Euro-­American domination of the ATS. The Antarctic political landscape is vastly more complicated than it was fifty years earlier. Even today, when much of Antarctica has been visited, and improved communications have modified its remoteness, the scientist is still presented as someone battling against heroic odds in order to unveil the secrets of the continent. In reality, Antarctic

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 79

21/12/2016 10:11

80  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica science has become routine and the popular image of Antarctica as a completely inhospitable place seems out of kilter. The centenary of the ‘race to the South Pole’ has seen a veritable explosion of art works, commemorations, museum exhibitions, adventure travel ­re-­enactments and writings revisiting events in Antarctica. The intensity of these cultural phenomena reveals that contemporary thinking about Antarctica is still in thrall to the ‘Heroic Age’ even if living and working in the Antarctic is vastly different in an era of Wi-­Fi and automated scientific stations. A broad range of contemporary representations, discourses and practices that revive the ‘Heroic Era’ rewrite, critique, constitute and imagine the cultural history and ­landscape of Antarctica, to provide a comprehensive understanding of the area’s fragile geopolitics’ placing them in a historical perspective and exploring the implications of the continued fascination with the ‘Heroic Age’ of Antarctica. Antarctic tourism and tourist operators’ representations of the continent continue to commoditize the ‘Heroic Age’ as foundational, as commercial tourism thrives around the historical sites and the ­trajectories of past expeditions. Despite the apparent loss of heroism, mystery and grandeur, the Antarctic continues to fascinate and enthrall. Scott may have been an incompetent fool, the Pole a meaningless point on the map of the Earth, but the Antarctic has not lost its allure. Antarctica is still a place of evocative images brought to us through literature, the visual arts and the pioneering images created by photographers such as Frank Hurley and Herbert Ponting. Thanks to the ATS, it also provides a remarkable set of political images and practices of international cooperation, largely free of serious tensions and conflicts. While this pacific vision is being challenged by controversies over illegal fishing and marine protection, the ‘Heroic Age’ remains sufficiently resourceful for those eager to trade and exchange memories and experiences of those past Edwardian explorer-­heroes. In Antarctica, there have been multiple forms of ‘harvesting’ from fish and seals to photographs and literary texts.

NOTES   1. Bloom 1993; Larsen 2012.   2. The history of the Antarctic continent coincides with its exploration by the Western countries. See Walton 2013, 1–34. The ‘Heroic Age’ of Antarctic exploration (1895–1922) was dominated by the 1912 race to the South Pole between Scott and Amundsen. For a complete history of Antarctica, see Day 2013.   3. On Scott’s journey, interpreted in the ‘heroic’ perspective, see Preston 1997. On the different features of the English and the Norwegian expeditions, see Wylie 2002.   4. See Karamanski 1984.   5. Spufford 1996, 343.   6. Moss 2006, 95–6.   7. See Turney 2012.   8. Jones 2012, 47.   9. Jones 2003, 131–60. 10. See Blackhall 2012. 11. The quotation is taken from Crane 2005, 581. See Barrie 1999. 12. It is worth mentioning that, in the colonial context, alien space, according to Carter 1987, exists when it is culturally assimilated. The discovery of the new land – Australia in Carter’s study, but the same ­principle functions for Antarctica as well – is the initial moment of cultural formation and generation of the continent. 13. Dutton 2009, 377–9. 14. See Barczewski 2014. 15. The definition ‘Heroic Age of polar exploration’ referring to the Antarctic was coined by Hayes 1932.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 80

21/12/2016 10:11

Heroic and post-­colonial Antarctic narratives  81 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Maddison 2014, 3. See Cherry-­Garrard 2003. Scott 2003, 476–7. See Huntford 1979. On Scott’s changing reputation see Jones 2011 and Jones 2012. See Brazzelli 2012. See Shackleton 2002. On Shackleton’s narrative see Brazzelli 2010. The literary value of Scott’s journals is discussed in Brazzelli 2005. See Bloom 1993. Glasberg 2008, 640–41. Larson 2011, 294. Dodds 2002, 13–33. See Dodds 2012a. For questions concerning Antarctic politics, see Brady 2013. See Haward 2011. See Scott 2011. See Burns 1998. Roberts 2012, 157. Joyner 1998, 24–53. For more general questions, see also Suter 1991. These connections are investigated in Brazzelli 2014. Dodds 2012b, 1. Dodds 2012b, 60–67. See Dodds 1997. Glasberg 2012, 2–3. See Glasberg 2002. Leane 2012, 155. On Bainbridge’s work see Brazzelli 2009, 41–53. All these fictional examples, and many more, are presented and discussed in Leane 2012. Day 2013, 521–3.

REFERENCES Arthur, E. 1994. Antarctic Navigations. London: Bloomsbury. Bainbridge, B. 1991. The Birthday Boys. London: Penguin. Barczewski, S. 2007. Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton, and the Changing Face of Heroism. Hambledon Continuum: London. Barczewski, S. 2014. The Historiography of Antarctic Exploration. Pages 214–30 in Kennedy, D. (ed.). Reinterpreting Exploration. The West in the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barrie, J.M. 1999 [1906, 1911]. Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Peter and Wendy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blackhall, S. 2012. Scott of the Antarctic. We Shall Die Like Gentlemen. Barnsley: Pen & Sword. Bloom, L. 1993. Gender on Ice. American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions. Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press. Brady, A.-­M. (ed.). 2013. The Emerging Politics of Antarctica. London, New York: Routledge. Brazzelli, N. 2005, Mapping the White Unknown: the Antarctic Ice in the Journals of Scott’s Last Expedition. Textus: 18(2): 297–312. Brazzelli, N. 2009. ‘Murders, Mysteries, Names’. Beryl Bainbridge e la riscrittura della Storia fra parodia ­postmoderna e prospettive femminili. Roma: Aracne. Brazzelli, N. 2010. La battaglia fra i ghiacci: South di Ernest Shackleton. Acme: LXIII(2): 65–76. Brazzelli, N. 2012. Introduzione. Scienza, esplorazione ed eroismo. Robert Falcon Scott al Polo Sud. Acme: LXV(3): 5–15. Brazzelli, N. 2014. Postcolonial Antarctica and the Memory of the Empire of Ice. Le Simplegadi: 12 (XII): 127–41. Burns, R. 1998. Stories about Place: The Antarctic as an International Reserve for Science. Pages 159–68 in Houston, C., Kurasawa, F., Watson, A. (eds). Imagined Places: the Politics of Making Space. La Trobe, Bundoora, Victoria, Australia: School of Sociology, Politics and Anthropology. Carter, P. 1987. The Road to Botany Bay. An Exploration of Landscape and History. London: Faber and Faber.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 81

21/12/2016 10:11

82  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Cherry-­Garrard, A. 2003 [1922]. The Worst Journey in the World. London: Pimlico. Crane, D. 2005. Scott of the Antarctic. A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South. London: HarperCollins. Darieussecq, M. 2003. White. Paris: Pol. Day, D. 2013. Antarctica. A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Diski, J. 1997. Skating to Antarctica. London: Granta. Dodds, K. 1997. Geopolitics in Antarctica. Views from the Southern Oceanic Rim. Chichester, New York: John Wiley & Sons. Dodds, K. 2002. Pink Ice. Britain and the South Atlantic Empire. London: I.B. Tauris. Dodds, K. 2006. Post-­colonial Antarctica: An Emerging Engagement. Polar Record: 42(230): 59–70. Dodds, K. 2012a. Scott of the Antarctic (1948). Geopolitics, Film and Britain’s Polar Empire. Acme: LXV(3): 59–70. Dodds, K. 2012b. The Antarctic. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dutton, J. 2009. Imperial Ice? The Influence of Empire on Contemporary French and British Antarctic Travel Writing. Studies in Travel Writing: 13(4): 369–80. Fiennes, R. 2004. Captain Scott. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Glasberg, E. 2002. Refusing History at the End of the Earth: Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Sur’ and the 2000–01 Women’s Antarctic Crossing. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature: 21(1): 99–121. Glasberg, E. 2008. Who Goes There? Science, Fiction, and Belonging in Antarctica. Journal of Historical Geography: 34: 639–57. Glasberg, E. 2012. Antarctica as Cultural Critique. The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Haward, M. 2011. Introduction: The Antarctic Treaty 1961–2011. The Polar Journal: 1(1): 1–4. Hayes, J.G. 1932. The Conquest of the South Pole: Antarctic Exploration 1906–1931. London: Thornton Butterworth. Hempleman-­Adams, D., Stuart, E., Gordon, S. 2009. The Heart of the Great Alone: Scott, Shackleton, and Antarctic Photography. New York: Bloomsbury. Hunt, R. 2014. Everland. London: Penguin. Huntford, R. 1979. Scott and Amundsen. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Jones, M. 2003. The Last Great Quest. Captain Scott’s Antarctic Sacrifice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, M. 2011. From ‘Noble Example’ to ‘Potty Pioneer’: Rethinking Scott of the Antarctic, c. 1945–2011. The Polar Journal: 1(2): 191–206. Jones, M. 2012. Why Do the British Still Remember Scott of the Antarctic? Acme: LXV(3): 47–58. Joyner, C.C. 1998. Governing the Frozen Commons. The Antarctic Regime and Environmental Protection. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Karamanski, T.J. 1984. The Heroic Ideal: Romantic Literature and the British Exploration of the Antarctic, 1901–1914. Fram: The Journal of Polar Studies: 1(2): 461–469. Larson, E.J. 2012. An Empire of Ice. Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science. New ­Haven – London: Yale University Press. Le Guin, U. 1969. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books. Le Guin, U. 1982. Sur. The New Yorker: 1 (February): 28–46. Leane, E. 2012. Antarctica in Fiction. Imaginative Narratives of the Far South. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maddison, B. 2014. Class and Colonialism in Antarctic Exploration, 1750–1920. London: Pickering & Chatto. May, K. 2013. Could Captain Scott Have Been Saved? Revisiting Scott’s Last Expedition. Polar Record. 49(248): 72–90. Moss, S. 2006. Scott’s Last Biscuit. The Literature of Polar Exploration. Oxford: Signal Books. Preston, D. 1997. A First Rate Tragedy. Captain Scott’s Antarctic Expeditions. London: Constable. Roberts, P. 2011. The European Antarctic. Science and Strategy in Scandinavia and the British Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Robinson, K. 1997. Antarctica. London: Harper Collins. Scott, R.F. 2003 [1913]. Scott’s Last Expedition. The Journals of Captain R.F. Scott, London: Pan Macmillan. Scott, S.V. 2011. Ingenious and Innocuous? Article IV of the Antarctic Treaty as Imperialism. The Polar Journal: 1(1): 51–62. Shackleton, E. 2002 [1919]. South. The Endurance Expedition. London: Penguin. Spufford, F. 1996. I May be Some Time. Ice and the English Imagination. London: Faber and Faber. Strange, C. 2012. Reconsidering the ‘Tragic’ Scott Expedition: Cheerful Masculine Home-­making in Antarctica, 1910–1913. Journal of Social History: 46(1): 66–88. Suter, K. 1991. Antarctica. Private Property or Public Heritage? London: Pluto Press. Turney, C. 2012. 1912. The Year the World Discovered Antarctica. London: The Bodley Head.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 82

21/12/2016 10:11

Heroic and post-­colonial Antarctic narratives  83 Walton, D. (ed.). 2013. Antarctica. Global Science for a Frozen Continent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wheeler, S. 1996. Terra Incognita. Travels in Antarctica. London: Vintage. Wilson, E.G. 2003. The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wylie, J. 2002. Earthly Poles. The Antarctic Voyages of Scott and Amundsen. Pages 169–183 in Blunt, A. and McEwan, C. (eds). Postcolonial Geographies. New York, London: Continuum.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 83

21/12/2016 10:11

6.  Antarctica: feminist art practices and disappearing polar landscapes in the age of the Anthropocene Lisa E. Bloom

INTRODUCTION In what ways can art portray ‘the violence of delayed effects’, a phrase used by Rob Nixon in his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor?1 How might it do so in a way that goes beyond the socio-­political phenomena in question to address the emotional disturbance of living amid the structural slow violence in the unremarkable everyday of the present? In what ways can environmental and climate change that still can’t be seen or felt introduce an age of dread and change our perceptual habits much as, say, Marshall McLuhan felt that new technology such as the telegraph did in an earlier era? This article focuses on environmental work by two women artists that attempts to address visually new forms of art, seeing, feeling, and sociality that are coming into being in the age of the Anthropocene. In what follows, I bring together issues in ‘critical climate change’ scholarship to examine aspects of feminist and environmentalist polar art in the works of Judit Hersko, Anne Noble, and Connie Samaras. It is taken from a book project that is tentatively entitled Visual Culture and Climate Change at the Poles: Contemporary Art in the Anthropocene. This work builds on research from my first book Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions,2 a special issue of a journal on gender and the polar regions,3 and a more recent article on climate change, art, and the polar regions.4 Gender on Ice invited us to think how conventional narratives about science, travel, gender, and race, as well as concepts of nationhood, attitudes towards nature, technology, and the wilderness were being reimagined during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Springboarding from the earlier study, the more recent writing draws on a range of representations within contemporary art and media production to rethink these narratives as the polar regions have shifted from the last space of heroic exploration to the first place of global decline. Scientists agree that climate change in the polar regions is taking place at two to three times the normal rate of elsewhere on the globe. This was especially apparent in 2014 when we saw the western fringes of Antarctica ‘pass a crucial tipping point, condemning to collapse – either melting, or sliding in the ocean, leading in the future to massive coastal flooding’.5 The word ‘collapse’ implies a sudden process, but in human terms ice sheets disappear slowly. As Nixon puts it, understanding such a story might not just be about comprehending its overall ‘slow violence’ that is rapid in geological terms, but not fast enough to capture news headlines. Another way of comprehending the ways it is incremental is seeing it also in Nixon’s terms, as ‘a violence of delayed effects’.6 In an age that celebrates instant spectacles, the slow-­paced and open-­ended side of climate change, except in catastrophes of spectacular destruction such as hurricanes, 84

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 84

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctica: feminist art practices  85 typhoons, and cyclones, creates representational obstacles that can hinder efforts to mobilize citizens when our evidence does not have the desired closure that the media seeks. Thus one of the tasks of my book project is to elucidate these complex images of global warming that are neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental. The majority of these new kinds of images contrast with the older heroic and melodramatic tropes of polar exploration photographs made by the celebrated ‘Heroic Age’ photographers Herbert G. Ponting (1870–1935) and Frank Hurley (1885–1962). In Frank Hurley’s photograph entitled ‘A Blizzard at Winter Quarters’ (1911–1914), silhouetted figures struggling against the wind and cold were superimposed onto a windy Antarctic landscape near the Australasian Antarctic Expedition’s base to illustrate the narrative of heroic life and death struggle – one of the more common narrative tropes of Antarctic exploration narratives and photographs. Ponting’s image of the Barne Glacier (1911) emphasizes the magnitude of this uninhabitable landscape. In Ponting’s photograph the epic scale of the glacier dominates the image to such an extent that the figure in the landscape is dwarfed by comparison. In many ways this image provides an ideal image of sublime wilderness, since it shows the inhospitable male space of the Antarctic as a testing ground in which isolation and physical danger combine with overwhelming beauty. As the world grows steadily more unpredictable with climate change, I use the term ‘anthropogenic landscapes’ to also rethink our notion of landscapes that have changed due to human-­induced greenhouse gas emissions. The term ‘anthropogenic landscapes’ or ‘human-­transformed landscapes’ as adopted here signals how changes in the physical environment causing climate change are irrevocably altering our relationship towards the wilderness and disrupting our ordinary ways of knowing and seeing.7 The shift in perception I am suggesting follows environmentalist Bill McKibben’s thinking when he renamed Hurricane Sandy a ‘Frankenstorm’ because of its hybrid nature and a ‘spooky combination of the natural and the unnatural’.8 Here the unnatural is not a malevolent, unseen spirit but the unintended consequence of late industrial civilization. The term ‘anthropogenic landscapes’ displaces the question of a simple mastery over nature (or vice versa) that is often associated with the conventional landscape tradition and the natural sublime. It also makes us radically question the ways in which we understand and interact with what used to be known as ‘nature’. These ideas are gaining momentum in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, as evidenced by the increasing frequency with which the term ‘Anthropocene’ is used in conferences and publications around the world. The Anthropocene thesis announces a paradigm shift in its claim that humankind is the driving power behind planetary transformation, an idea popularized by Nobel laureate and chemist Paul Crutzen. In other words Crutzen is saying that the human being has become something much larger than the simple biological agent that he or she has always been. As historian Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, ‘Humans now wield a geological force to have an impact on the planet itself. To call human beings geological agents is to scale up our imagination of the human.’ The consequences of this are enormous according to Chakrabarty, ‘since it shifts the temporal parameters away from the expectation of continuity to contemplate the idea of extinction, that is to say, a future without “us”’.9 In the ‘anthropogenic landscape’ the polar regions may still be a place of fascinating but forbidden beauty, but the awe once reserved for Ponting’s or Hurley’s photographs of untrammeled nature now stems from the uncertainties resulting from the gradual human

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 85

21/12/2016 10:11

86  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica destruction of nature transformed – the Anthropocene. By refusing to approach the idea of a wilderness or sublime landscape as separate from the human or the animal, some of the artwork here makes us more aware of how the Earth and human systems are intimately entwined. The threat this process evokes yields a different kind of horror as these places undergo accelerated warming. By focusing on the work of three women artists that traveled to Antarctica – Judit Hersko, Anne Noble, and Connie Samaras – the article turns a feminist lens on what is still often seen as a very masculine heroic geographical site and questions the claim that these heroic concepts were left behind in the last century.10 It asks how their work has changed our ways of seeing this region as a primary site of the contemporary experience of the sublime and climate change.11 My analysis investigates the new stories and images that are produced by these women artists to re-­visualize the Antarctic and examines the impact that the older aesthetic traditions of the sublime as well as the genres of literary fiction, science fiction, and horror, has had on their work. It calls attention to the shift in the terror of scale in these women’s artwork. In the images of these artists we are no longer dealing with an inhuman scale. These landscapes, unlike the photographs of Ponting and Hurley, do not overwhelm our categories of understanding.

IN AND OUT OF PLACE: JUDIT HERSKO’S ‘PAGES FROM THE BOOK OF THE UNKNOWN EXPLORER’ One representative artist of this project who deals directly with many of the key issues around gender, art, and climate change in my book is Judit Hersko. Hersko is a Professor at California State University, San Marcos, who traveled to Antarctica on a National Science Foundation Artist’s grant in 2008. Her ‘Pages from the Book of the Unknown Explorer’ (2008–2015) unpacks the current revival of interest in polar narratives from earlier eras and the older images by Hurley and Ponting that mythologized the enterprizing male explorer of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her work, driven as she is with questions of time, perception, and shifting notions of nature, Hersko creates an alternate photographic and cinematic history of exploration and climate science in Antarctica. To do so she rethinks the landscape of Antarctica, a landscape that is on the verge of disappearing due to anthropogenic pollution, through a unique rewriting of a Jewish woman’s presence in Antarctic history. Hersko presents her recent work as part-­fantasy and part-­history, as a lecture with one hundred and twenty images that incorporates photographic and cinematic documentation as well as artwork about a fictional Jewish female explorer, photographer and Antarctic biologist from the 1930s named Anna Schwartz (see Figure 6.1). Hersko’s character, Anna, appears on Admiral Byrd’s 1939 expedition and, while passing as a white man, becomes the only woman at that time to work before the 1960s as a biologist and photographer in Antarctica.12 Schwartz’s trip to Antarctica by its very choice of dates evokes the 1939 invasion of Poland when Eastern European Jews, such as Schwartz, were loaded into boxcars and sent to concentration camps.13 In this respect, the juxtaposition of Antarctica in the late 1930s with the contemporary debates around climate change today raises questions later in Hersko’s narrative about how she connects the present to the past through a vision of traumatic catastrophe.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 86

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctica: feminist art practices  87

Figure 6.1  Judit Hersko, Portrait of Anna Schwartz, 2008

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 87

21/12/2016 10:11

88  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica For her narrative, Hersko draws on both a rich artistic and literary tradition, the literary including Ursula Le Guin’s short story ‘Sur’ (1982), a utopian feminist fictional account about an exploration in which a party of South American women reach the South Pole in 1909, two years before the official arrival of the real exploration teams of Amundsen and Scott.14 Hersko’s work is influenced by the women characters in Le Guin’s fantasy who do not feel compelled to leave any record, or proof, of their presence at the South Pole, as evidenced by one of the characters’ activities of fashioning sculptures from ice. Like the disappearing ice sculptures in Le Guin’s short story, Hersko’s artwork and narrative can be preserved only in her ephemeral art, not in heroic monuments that celebrate male heroic narratives and imagery of the Heroic Age. Hersko draws her aesthetic from an earlier historical moment of surrealist photography by using photo-­collages, transparent sculptures, and cinematic projections to emphasize the shadow, light, and transparency of images and place. To do this, she draws on forms and styles rarely if ever used in relation to Antarctica: photo-­collage and surrealism. Inspired by the surrealist albums of Victorian women, who invented a method of photo-­ collage later adopted by avant garde artists, Hersko borrows this aesthetic style to visually render the placement of people in circumstances they could not ordinarily inhabit. To reveal how visually out of place Anna Schwartz might have been on these expeditions, Hersko creates compelling photo-­montages that place Schwartz, the fictional explorer, into already existing photographs of Antarctic exploration (see Figure 6.2).

Figure 6.2  Judit Hersko, With Scott at the Pole (collage by Anna Schwartz), 2011

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 88

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctica: feminist art practices  89 These images of her ‘unknown explorer’ depart from the images of the traditional sublime and its heroic masculinity and are much more in keeping with her interest in making visible threats from global warming that take time to wreak havoc. She ­highlights what otherwise might be difficult to see – two transparent planktonic snails, the Clione ­antarctica (sea angel) and the microscopic Limacina helicina (sea butterfly) (see Figure 6.3).15 These snails were plentiful in the days of her ‘unknown’ woman explorer, but now due to the effects of ocean acidification their shells are dissolving. The danger that interests Hersko is less spectacular and less familiar to the public than dramatic popular images of the contemporary sublime and of apocalyptic climate change. But Hersko’s invented narrative highlights aspects of global warming that escape notice because they happen at microscopic levels and rates so slow that transformation is too gradual to note. In some ways her work addresses the failure of perception and cognition, the result of which is our inability to deal with critical changes facing us over extended time. Hersko’s art explores representations of these microscopic creatures at a moment when they are disappearing, thereby creating a melancholic aesthetic that engages with the photographic materials from the past but gives them a new value that is different from the period from when they were made. The melancholia of her work has parallels to Walter Benjamin’s conception of surrealist allegory, as she engages us to think of these planktonic snails as having ceased to exist while we are presented with a fictional narrative and images about the first time they were documented in the 1930s by Anna Schwartz.16 As her work aesthetically activates these lost images, they begin to signify from both moments in time, almost simultaneously. In the place of the heroic portraits of Byrd and his men, the minimal scale of Hersko’s portrait of the ‘Unknown Explorer’ emphasizes the contingent nature of Schwartz’s heroism as well as the surprising obsession and motivation from another time for her clandestine expedition to Antarctica– the seemingly insignificant documentation of microscopic creatures. These details enforce the illusion of factuality that the story seeks to create and set up a creative engagement between the unknown explorer and her otherwise ordinary microscopic pteropods that are slowly perishing in the present. We never learn if the unknown explorer’s reasons to escape are connected to the Holocaust, but the evocation of this possibility seems to foreshadow further catastrophe for her pteropods. The persistence of this past in her narrative evokes the future. Significantly, Hersko’s reference to this history is tempered by her own personal relationship to the Holocaust and how her own parents survived Nazi persecution. Hersko’s narrative and archive are symbolic since they imagine what Jewish women’s contribution to science, polar exploration, and art history might have been in Antarctica’s early history if women’s relationship to Antarctica was not merely speculative during Anna Schwartz’s era. For this reason, Hersko’s fictional narrative insists that one must take into account the imaginative histories that run alongside real polar histories. Her archive of images on Antarctica is suitably dreamlike and includes projected cinematic images, etched photographic images on glass and silicone, and photo-­montages that deliberately draw on photographic tropes from the period to give the pictures a “reality effect” (see Figures 6.1–6.3). At the same time, her work disorients us since she puts people and organisms in an order and place they would not normally inhabit such as the unlikely inclusion of Schwartz at the time that Jews in Europe were fleeing the Nazis. Namely, by

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 89

21/12/2016 10:11

90  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

Figure 6.3  Judit Hersko, Pteropods (from the scientific notebooks of Anna Schwartz), 2008

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 90

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctica: feminist art practices  91 shifting the history of Antarctic exploration even slightly, Hersko alters our perception of the present and helps us understand how the rhetoric of both Antarctic exploration narratives and polar climate change bears the imprint of gender and Jewishness. However, Hersko’s goal is not to obtain mastery over trauma by rendering it in terms of existing cultural codes, but to foreground and make connections between the affective consequences of the Holocaust and climate change. In its drive to obtain mastery over trauma by rendering it legible in terms of existing cultural codes, her performance piece appears to disregard what Cathy Caruth calls ‘the event’s essential incomprehensibility, the force of its affront to understanding’.17 Yet, for all its investment in a surrealist aesthetic, the work remains haunted by a traumatic history that exceeds and breaks down accustomed habits of thought, narration, and visualization.

OFF COLOUR: HIGHLIGHTING THE GOOD OLD DAYS IN ANNE NOBLE’S PHOTOGRAPHS Professor Anne Noble is a well-­known New Zealand photo-­based artist at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand. She has been working on Antarctica since 2002 when she first traveled to the continent through the New Zealand Antarctic Program and on the US National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Program.18 Noble is interrogating landscape practices and the role of images in the construction of visual knowledge and understanding of Antarctica in the present day. Like Hersko’s work, which is engaged with a woman explorer who did not exist in the early twentieth century, Noble also focuses on the relationship between fact and fiction. However, unlike Hersko, who sifts through the random detritus of the past, both real and fictional, Noble is more concerned with contemporary myths and calls the viewer’s attention to the recuperation and rehabilitation at a distance of a kind of colonial masculinity in Antarctica. She reworks contemporary images of Antarctica to examine the visual tropes that contribute to the maintenance of the perception that Antarctica is still an all-­male continent or a living memorial to the good old days when only men could populate the continent. The creative challenge of Noble’s work is her examination of how gender is implicated in her questioning of how we should see Antarctica in a context in which we can no longer distinguish between its everyday facticity and its cultural representation, as a place that is still very much constituted by male heroic narratives and imagery of the Heroic Age. Her work explores what the formerly Heroic Age of exploration means not only in the context of postcolonialism but also at a moment when we are thinking about the imminent decline of this icy habitat. Substitution and humor are central to Noble’s work, especially as they relate to hidden assumptions about Antarctica and contemporary tourism. In works such as ‘The Barne Glacier’ (2001) Noble presents two dummies dressed in NSF standard issue extreme weather gear standing before a panoramic photograph of the Barne glacier in an Antarctic-­themed indoor entertainment center (see Figure 6.4). It is sited in the foyer of the Christchurch Antarctic Centre. This image references Frank Hurley’s photograph ‘A Blizzard at Winter Quarters’ (1911–1914) and Herbert Ponting’s image of the Barne Glacier (1911). Noble’s photographs, however, reverse Ponting’s use of beauty and space. Her images are much more tightly framed and almost claustrophobic, robbing the setting of its epic

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 91

21/12/2016 10:11

92  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

Figure 6.4  Anne Noble, ‘The Barne Glacier, Christchurch Antarctic Centre’, 2001 character. While the photographic beauty of her images is central to the meaning, she is also asking us to rethink the way we currently understand the sublime in the present. In her image of the Barne Glacier (2001) she draws out the beauty of the sublime in her use of color and light in an artificial simulated landscape environment, making an uncanny commentary about the continuing cultural investment in Hurley’s and Ponting’s work and the contradictions between the Antarctica visualized in Ponting’s and Hurley’s photographs and the kitsch aesthetic of sublime wilderness now produced in indoor settings such as the Antarctic Center where she took this image. Noble’s critique of the contemporary banalization of early Antarctic exploration is taken even further in Antarctic Storm, Christchurch, New Zealand (2002) (see Figure 6.5) where we see another image of tourists at the Antarctic Center in New Zealand ‘experiencing’ extreme Antarctica weather inside a diorama. The glaciers and ice appear as crucial props to the scene, as does the very large thermometer in the foreground, which quickly makes us understand that the Antarctic experience of surviving the cold might only last twenty minutes. Whereas Hurley’s and Ponting’s images emphasize the heroic travails of members of different early expeditions to Antarctica, Noble’s work by contrast hyperaestheticizes these simulations to create a more jarring understanding of Antarctica that disrupts the ‘experience’ of this remote continent that is now made available to everyone.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 92

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctica: feminist art practices  93

Figure 6.5  Anne Noble, ‘Antarctic Storm’, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2002 At the same time she mocks the idea of a staged spectacle easily consumed by anyone who can afford a ticket at an entertainment center. In the past, the poles had served as testing grounds for an exclusive heroic masculinity. Photographs such as this one turn the conventions of photographic beauty back at the audience, and in so doing express a more ironic relationship to the way Antarctica’s now lost heroic sublime is consumed uncritically by tourists in comfortable artificial settings. In her more recent work, Noble playfully re-examines photographic landscape practices and strikes a lighter note in the context of these more serious historic discourses about the difficulty of life in desolate and freezing regions, and substitutes the banal details of everyday life in Antarctica to inflect her work with humor and parody as a means of taking us beyond ordinary points of seeing. Her use of parody comes through best in work that explores the ways that male inhabitants of Antarctica still construct rituals that suggest that Antarctica remains the masculine space of the imperial frontier as opposed to the less exclusive and fairly developed domestic infrastructure of human habitation. This projection of an exclusionary masculinity extends to the fact that in the far reaches of the different American scientific bases of Antarctica, outdoor toilets exist alongside primitive peeing stations for men only, as documented in her recent photographic installation ironically entitled ‘Piss Poles, Antarctica #1-­#6’. This work comprises six large photographs of

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 93

21/12/2016 10:11

94  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

Figure 6.6  Anne Noble, ‘Piss Pole #2’, Antarctica, 2008 ‘piss poles’ taken at various US research locations, and uses an aesthetic rhetoric as well as iconic markers, such as the flag to engage critically with the Heroic Age (see Figure 6.6). Noble’s documentation of the everyday use of flags as identity markers for peeing outdoors at many remote field camps in Antarctica is a deadpan twist on narratives of early twentieth century nationalisms in which flags enjoyed an exalted status in the context of British colonialism. Not only has the heroic national banner been reduced to piss poles in her work, but she further banalizes them by shooting them in such a way to make them resemble golf course flags. To underscore the contrast between the piss poles and the flags of conquest connected with older narratives of colonialism and polar exploration that they inadvertently seem to mimic, she refuses certain typical conventions of discovery: the horizon, the high vantage point, the gaze of acquisitive ownership. Instead, some of these images seek flatness by cutting out the landscape altogether or including a small portion not of a pristine landscape, but of a more industrial one. What stands out is her jarring use of the color of gold that brings all three together, a color she then uses effectively to set the aesthetic quality of the image at odds with the content. In the Piss Poles, Antarctica (2008), she turns the most impossible and mundane evidence of human presence, the stain of urine in a pristine landscape into an object of beauty rather than revulsion to make us aware of how the reverential attitude toward the Heroic Age can also extend to scientists

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 94

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctica: feminist art practices  95 who often see their pursuit of scientific research in Antarctica as following in the footsteps of earlier explorers from the Heroic Age. Noble’s work is motivated by her belief that Antarctica cannot be visualized. To make her point she works as a conceptual artist rather than as a traditional photographer visiting the real place (Antarctica) as well as the simulacrums (the Antarctic discovery centers around the world) and giving them both equal weight in her work. One of the most compelling and well-­known set of photographs that she took in Antarctica is a 2007 series entitled ‘Whiteout’ that presents complete whiteout conditions in Antarctica. Her photographic images capture the shifting effect of light during a whiteout, and since these are images of whiteness that capture the shifting effects of light, the photographs are of an entirely abstract nature. Like Hersko, Noble is concerned with issues of perception and what cannot be seen because the colonizing eye from the Heroic Age of photography is so strong. These photographs move us away from conventional photographs because of the way they formulaically apply the conventions of landscape photography, erasing or ignoring a more disturbing aspect that foregrounds the anxiety and sense of vulnerability and dislocation that is part of negotiating this extreme environment. Noble believes that Antarctica hasn’t been properly observed, and her white-­out images with their blinding light remind us that in the post-­Heroic Age, while the region is increasingly more ­accessible, the same anxieties of managing the forbidden climate remain today.

CONNIE SAMARAS’S FUTURES IN EXTREME ENVIRONMENTS: TOWARDS A NEW AESTHETICS OF DAILY LIFE AND SURVIVAL IN VALIS Connie Samaras is a photo-­based artist and Professor at the University of California, Irvine. She has been working on Antarctica and the South Pole since 2004–5 when she first traveled to Antarctica with the US National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Program.19 As an artist, Samaras is drawn to communities in geographically extreme environments – Antarctica, Dubai, Las Vegas and the US Southwest Desert – that are unique and lack a conventional historical core, or a conventional population make-­up. Situated in the desert or on ice, these places almost appear like a tabula rasa where various urban and community experiments are carried out – both in the past and present. Samaras’s 2005 Antarctica project entitled VALIS (vast active living intelligence system) consists of photographs and two videos she took while on an artist’s residency at the American base in the Antarctic station.20 Like Noble and Hersko, she approaches Antarctica from a deliberately anti-­heroic perspective through a focus on what it means to live in such an inhospitable, and thus anxiety-­provoking built environment. Samaras herself uses the phrase built environment to describe her work to invoke a critique of ‘environment’ as solely about nature. Putting in the word ‘built’ foregrounds the architectural and technological transformations of the environments that we tend to think of as our natural spaces. In her work at the South Pole station, Samaras is rethinking a landscape that is now on the verge of disappearance due to anthropogenic pollution, even though in the recent past its built environment (as represented by the Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome at the South Pole) functioned as representations of Antarctica’s utopian possibilities. A

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 95

21/12/2016 10:11

96  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

Figure 6.7  Connie Samaras, VALIS Dome and Tunnels, 2005 common idea in the 1950s was to have Antarctic cities enclosed under such glass domes, which would have made colonization of this continent possible. Samaras’s photographs of a sinking Buckminster Fuller dome are metaphoric since they suggest an end to Antarctica’s long history of being separate from the world, and a place of both scientific and architectural uniqueness. Fantasy as evoked by science fiction is key to understanding Samaras’s work in these geographically extreme regions.21 For example, she evokes how alien the landscape is in Antarctica, when she foregrounds how uncontrollable the ice is as it swallows up buildings and signs of life in photographs of the Buckminster Fuller dome in ‘Domes and Tunnels’ (see Figure 6.7), and in ‘Buried Fifties Station’. Like the landscape, the photographed interiors are empty and deserted.22 Her focus on these alien-­looking buildings, combined with her emphasis on the undomestic interiors and exteriors, such as her photograph taken underneath the new Amundsen-­Scott Station when it was under construction, has a strangeness that is intermixed with ordinariness, creating a dissonance with, on the one hand, the discourse of Antarctica as an untouched landscape and, on the other, a scientific utopia of the future. Neither characterization fits the Antarctica represented in her art (see Figure 6.8). All of Samaras’s images are found rather than staged, except for a sole photograph of a strange empty domestic interior inside the Buckminster Fuller dome at the South Pole,

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 96

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctica: feminist art practices  97

Figure 6.8  Connie Samaras, VALIS Dome Interior, 2005 showing two rows of red sleeping quarters facing each other that she altered slightly by flipping the negative, making the sleeping quarters mirror each other. Although the photograph is only slightly changed, the interior looks, in the mind of the viewer, alternatively like meat lockers, future cells for monks, or worse, like a morgue (see Figure 6.8). The bright red sealed bunk spaces and the dome ceiling together are more easily imagined as occupied by a strange organized cult in a science fiction film than a real place where actual scientists live and work. Her slight digital manipulation of this space is done deliberately to make us wonder about social relations and subjectivity itself, be it male or female, in such a strange and unearthly interior. In her Antarctic photographs, Samaras’s aesthetic strategy combines the everyday with the surreal to visualize settlements in extreme geographical regions in a manner that on one level evokes the rest of the world’s major cities in terms of its built environment, but at the same time remains incongruous and outside of nature due to its seeming artificiality. Her aesthetic approach to the ordinary and everyday is different to Noble’s, since she injects something more unsettling and unearthly into what otherwise appear to be fairly neutral and objective images of Antarctica’s built environment, with its mostly anonymous industrial structures, as in her photograph, Underneath Amundsen-­Scott Station (see Figure 6.9). Samaras understands these sites not as remote spaces that demand to be mapped, but rather as spaces closely connected to globalized economic and geo-­political forces. Her work attempts to symbolically position Antarctica in the neo-­liberal order of transposable postmodern architecture of new urban megacities. Which is fitting, as the new Amundsen-­Scott Station, one of the buildings she photographs, was operated at the time by a division of Raytheon, a leading company in the weapons industry. One of the consequences of neo-­liberalism is to impose a certain degree of uniformity on all cities. Despite Antarctica’s extreme climate, the built environment there nevertheless suggests a kind of neo-­liberal logic emerging, as evidenced by Samaras’s photograph of the submerged Buckminster Fuller dome that makes it appear as if it has been abandoned or left to deteriorate, not because it cannot be used meaningfully, but perhaps because it cannot

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 97

21/12/2016 10:11

98  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

Figure 6.9  Connie Samaras, VALIS, Underneath Amundsen-Scott Station, 2005 be used profitably. Samaras herself has written on neo-­liberalism and why these images of Antarctica belong in a larger series that includes photographs of the built environments in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, among other sites.23 Like Hersko and Noble, Samaras deliberately plays with the variable space between documentary and fiction that sets her images apart from the public narratives and images of the Heroic Age of exploration. Her photographs represent a shift from an image of the polar regions as representative of the sublime, to the present where the Antarctic is visualized as a place of overwhelming beauty and terror, but this time as a result of anthropogenic climate change and neo-­liberalism. Moreover, in Samaras’s images, the Antarctic is no longer seen as simply an unearthly place, but also as a strangely fragile site, one where the ice itself becomes an important entity. The built environment seems vulnerable and unstable, as in her work, ‘Domes and Tunnel’, see Figure 6.7, where the shifting pack ice will cover the Buckminster Fuller dome already slowly sinking in the permafrost, or in ‘Antennae Field South Pole’, an image of an empty Antarctic landscape that dwarfs a tiny radio antenna standing as the only sign of human habitation.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 98

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctica: feminist art practices  99

CONCLUSION The recent art works of Judit Hersko, Anne Noble, and Connie Samaras have revealed new perspectives from artists who are restaging the politics of gender, sexuality, and climate change in Antarctica from feminist perspectives. Amelia Jones, the contemporary art historian, argues that the most important legacy of feminism is its politics of positionality across the visual.24 By this she means the importance of emphasizing the situatedness of positionality, of visuality, and of spectatorship. Noble and Samaras are interested in the social space of taking photographs, and their performances behind the camera are committed to recording their embodied relationship to Antarctica. For Samaras and Noble, that means highlighting the sense of dislocation and anxiety involved in living in such an extreme environment. Their work is not about heroic masculinity but something much more displaced, related to both their positionality as well as the placelessness of the site that they both photograph. Their detailed focus on the everyday moves us away from narratives that erase or ignore real life suffering and counters the romanticism and fantasies of the transcendence of the body through moral character that characterizes so much of the British discourse in Antarctica in the early twentieth century.25 If Hersko brings us back to the earlier days of polar explorers and the epic by inserting her unknown Jewish woman explorer into her fantasized re-­enactment of the Byrd expedition, Samaras pulls us away, bringing us into another fantasy space where she plays with the abstract – even inhuman – aspect of Antarctica to make us imagine how climate change and globalization have transformed these spaces in ways we otherwise would not have imagined. By refusing the aesthetics of the sublime from the Heroic Age, Samaras highlights the unreality, as well as the drab ordinariness of this landscape and built environment. By virtue of her photographs that situate banal architecture in a sublime landscape, she draws our attention to the surreal contrast between the everyday and the heroic. This is also an important concern for Noble, especially in her ‘Whiteout’ series, but her use of color in the Antarctic displays, the Piss Poles, tends to be more visceral than Samaras’s photographs to capture the sheer physical attraction and presence of what she photographs. Noble’s method is to use beauty in her work in an unexpected and even jarring way to get us to retrieve the Antarctic that implicitly questions the framing of the Antarctic landscape as heroic and sublime, whether from the remote regions of American bases in Antarctica or in dioramas of Antarctica in entertainment centers in New Zealand, Japan, or elsewhere. Irony is critical to Samaras’ aesthetic, as it is to Noble’s, though Hersko’s use of irony is similar to that of the surrealists. She returns to the heroic registers of the early twentieth century to perversely restage a masculine imperial past within a neo-­liberal present, whereas Noble’s use of irony recalls that of the postmodernists that intervene in a discourse that confidently explores, maps, and visualizes a space, thus turning it into a place we now claim to consume. Samaras, Noble, and Hersko are telling stories about an absent subjectivity. But while Hersko uses this as an occasion to make a statement on the invisibility of woman’s place in polar narratives and a lost or obscured perception, Samaras’s interest is more in creating a new aesthetics about daily life and survival in these unearthly neo-­liberal institutional settings. Thus her aesthetics, compared to both Noble’s exuberant conceptualism and Hersko’s sensuousness, is extremely spare and pared down, though she does employ an emotionality to convey an informational richness in her work

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 99

21/12/2016 10:11

100  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica that ­differentiates it from more reserved, dead-­pan photographic practices. Neither of the artists’ works can be simply folded back into a conventional discussion of the sublime or politics. All three artists are engaging these regions in new ways by searching for alternative narratives and aesthetics in the very dramatic contemporary situation of climate change without falling into the old heroic/melodramatic tropes of the sublime. Herkso does this specifically by drawing comparisons between two holocausts to move us away from the purely visualizable as the basis for knowledge. Consequently, none of these artists offers the unimaginable scale that we associate with the sublime, and instead each plays off the epic quality of these male heroic narratives and images. Hersko’s, Noble’s, and Samaras’s viewpoints suggest some important new directions in contemporary art, and in the process, their work makes us think about how feminist perspectives have contributed to making us think critically about the conservative apocalyptic versions of the contemporary sublime and a kind of neo-­liberal aesthetics that is at the heart of current discussion about climate change, through art history as well as Antarctic discourses. The viewer’s aesthetic experience of their work is not just about landscape, the masculinist heroic subjectivity, but also subjectivity itself, be it male or female, since their narratives are about rethinking a landscape that is threatened as much by human actions as through the agency of geophysical processes alone. Samaras’s work is explicit about the fundamentally anthropogenic character of the Antarctic built environment in a way that troubles the assumptions of the Antarctic Treaty System, which defines human activity as being transient and thus inconsequential. One can only imagine what could happen if they, or other artists in their wake, bring this transformed aesthetic sensibility to other contemporary sites undergoing environmental degradation to examine how it is often in the spaces that we cannot see or know where history, aesthetics, and climate politics intersect and collide in the most compelling of ways.

NOTES   1.   2.   3.   4.   5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Nixon 2011, 2–3. Bloom 1993. Bloom, Glasberg and Kay 2008. Bloom and Glasberg 2012. Science and Research News 2014. Nixon 2011, 11. Bampton 1999. McKibben 2012. Chakrabarty 2009. See Barczewski 2007; Collis 2008; Rosner 2008 and 2009; and Dodds 2009. Morley 2010. See Judit Hersko’s website: http://www.judithersko.com/ for images and a full description of her Antarctic, work-­in-­progress art project, ‘From the Pages of the Unknown Explorer.’ Also see Hersko 2009 and 2012. Bloom 2006. See Le Guin 1982; Glasberg 2012; and Leane 2009. Hersko has been working with biological oceanographer Victoria Fabry, and her artwork on climate change and planktonic snails is an outgrowth of that collaboration. Benjamin 1999. Caruth 1995, 154. See the first two volumes of a trilogy devoted to her photographic investigations of Antarctica (Noble

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 100

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctica: feminist art practices  101 2011; Jones 2014), as well as Elena Glasberg’s writings on Anne Noble’s Antarctic photography: Glasberg 2008 and 2012. 19. For reviews of Samaras’s Antarctic photographs, see Bloom 2008 and 2013; Carson 2013; Glasberg 2012; Newhouse 2008; Tsatsos 2013; and Viegener 2007. 20. Samaras 2008. 21. Samaras names her work after Phillip K. Dick’s semi-­autobiographical VALIS trilogy based on his own claim to have had paranormal experiences. Dick’s VALIS trilogy is a study of the invasion of technology from the future into the present, established by supernatural intelligence, into the life of an ordinary, present-­day man who is having a nervous breakdown. As Samaras indicates in her article ‘American Dreams’, her photographic work, like Dick’s novel, highlights some of the ways that scientific and technological rationality combats but fails to contain the forces of superstition and irrationality. See Samaras 2008. 22. $$$ 23. Samaras 2008. 24. Jones 2006. 25. Bloom 1993, 111–36.

REFERENCES Bampton, M. 1999. Anthropogenic Transformation. In D.E. Alexander and R.W. Fairbridge (eds). Encyclopedia of Environmental Science. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Barczewski, S. 2008. Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton, and the Changing Face of Heroism. London: Hambledon & London. Benjamin, W. 1999. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bloom, L. 1993. Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bloom, L. 2006. Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity. London: Routledge. Bloom, L. 2008. Polar Fantasies and Aesthetics in the Work of Isaac Julien and Connie Samaras. The Scholar and the Feminist 71.http://sfonline.barnard.edu/ice/bloom_01.htm. Bloom, L. 2013. Connie Samaras’ Futures in Extreme Environments: Toward a New Aesthetics of Daily Life and Survival. Page 83 in Irene Tastsos (ed.). Connie Samaras: Tales of Tomorrow. New York: DAP Press. Bloom, L. and E. Glasberg. 2012. Disappearing Ice and Missing Data: Visual Culture of the Polar Regions and Global Warming. Pages 117–42 in A. Polli and J. Marsching (eds). Far Fields: Digital Culture, Climate Change, and the Poles. Bristol: Intellect Press. Bloom, L., E. Glasberg, and L. Kay. 2008. Introduction to Gender on Ice. The Scholar and the Feminist 71. http://sfonline.barnard.edu/ice/intro_01.htm. Carson, J. 2013. V.A.L.I.S.: Modernity’s Buried Present. Page 19 in Irene Tastsos (ed.). Connie Samaras: Tales of Tomorrow. New York: DAP Press. Caruth, C. 1995. ‘Recapturing the Past.’ Introduction. Pages 155–7 in Cathy Caruth (ed.). Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chakrabarty, D. 2009. The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter). Collis, C. 2009. The Australian Antarctic Territory: A Man’s World? Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34: 514–19. Dodds, K. 2009. Settling and Unsettling Antarctica. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34: 505–9. Farley, R. 2005. By Endurance We Conquer: Ernest Shackleton and Performances of White Male Hegemony. International Journal of Cultural Studies 8(2): 231–54. Glasberg, E. 2012. Antarctica as Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hersko, J. 2009. Translating and Retranslating Data: Tracing the Steps in Projects that address climate change and Antarctic science. Published in eScholarship, University of California, 12 December 2009, http://­ escholarship.org/uc/item/40z2b75n. Hersko, J. 2012. Pages from the Book of the Unknown Explorer. Pages 61–75 in A. Polli and J.D. Marsching (eds). Far Field: Digital Culture, Climate Change, and the Poles. Bristol: Intellect Press. Jones, A. 2006. Self/Image: Technology, Representation and the Contemporary Subject. London: Routledge. Jones, L. 2014. The Last Road: Anne Noble. Auckland, New Zealand: Clouds. Le Guin, U. 1982. ‘Sur.’ Compass Rose Stories. Harper and Row.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 101

21/12/2016 10:11

102  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Leane, E. 2009. Placing Women in the Antarctic Literary Landscape. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34(3): 509–14. McKibben, B. 2012. Why ‘Frankenstorm’ is Just Right for Hurricane Sandy. The Daily Beast. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/26/bill-­mckibben-­on-­why-­frankenstorm-­is-­just-­right-­for-­hurricane-­sandy.html. Morley, S. 2010. The Sublime: Documents of Contemporary Art. London and Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press. Newhouse, K. 2008. Connie Samaras. V.A.L.I.S. X-­TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly 10:4 (Summer). Nixon, R. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Noble, A. 2011. Ice Blink. Auckland: Clouds. Polli, A. and Marsching, J. (eds), Far Fields: Digital Culture, Climate Change, and the Poles, Bristol: Intellect Press. Rosner, V. 2008. Where No Woman Has Gone Before. Women’s Review of Books 35: 21–4. Rosner, V. 2009. Gender and Polar Studies: Mapping the Terrain. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34: 489–94. Samaras, C. 1997. Is it Tomorrow or Just the End of Time? Pages 200–13 in J. Terry (ed.). Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life. New York: Routledge. Samaras, C. 2008. America Dreams. The Scholar and the Feminist 71. http://sfonline.barnard.edu/ice/samaras_01.htm. Science and Research News. 2014. Ice Sheets may have already passed point of no return. Monthly archives: June 2014. Science Q Publishing Group. https://journalpublication.wordpress.com/2014/06/. Tsatsos, I. (ed.) 2013. Connie Samaras: Tales of Tomorrow. New York: DAP Press. Viegener, M. 2007. Connie Samaras, De Soto Gallery, Los Angeles CA. Artus (Fall). Wedde, I. 2011. In the Blink of an Eye. In A. Noble (ed.). Iceblink, Auckland: Clouds.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 102

21/12/2016 10:11

7.  The continent for science Aant Elzinga

The purpose of this chapter is to highlight some facets in the politics, history and substance of Antarctic science over the past fifty years. Part I focuses on institutional arrangements and political context and Part II on advances in the knowledge content of the science.

I – BOUNDARIES, CONTEXT(S), DRIVERS AND COORDINATION The geographic region designated for Antarctic science is ambiguous. Its delimitation differs depending on whether one follows the definition offered by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), the body charged by the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), a non-­governmental organization, or if one chooses the definition found in the legal text of the Antarctic Treaty (AT), the intergovernmental regime for governing Antarctic affairs. The Treaty defines its region of application as the continent and its nearby islands south of 60°S latitude. SCAR fixes on the Antarctic Convergence (Polar Front), the demarcation favoured from the start by the USSR, and therefore extends its studies into the Sub-­Antarctic. The Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty for the Protection of the Environment (1991) – with its own scientific ­committee – applies to the same area but more obliquely, since its representation of the Antarctic Environment includes ‘dependent and associate ecosystems’1 which have never been defined. Interpretative flexibility is indicative of how Antarctic science has been and still is enmeshed in Antarctic politics and how the boundaries drawn in some respects are human constructions. SCAR as a science body chooses natural boundaries (note that it includes areas like Tristan and Gough outside the Convergence but biologically connected) while 60°S is an expedient political boundary as are all political boundaries in the long run. Strong academic boundaries also influence the scope of inquiry in as far as both the political regime and SCAR subscribe to the narrow English-­speaking definition of ‘science’. The lens is thus on natural sciences, including psychology, while some other intellectual disciplines one finds under the much broader term ‘Wissenschaft’ or its equivalent in other European languages have traditionally rested outside SCAR’s remit – it is only recently that history and some parts of the social sciences and humanities have gained official recognition. The predominance of English in present-­day scientific journals and books is also reflected in the present chapter since it draws mainly on that literature, whereas it is difficult to determine comparatively how much attention Antarctic science, its conditions and its role in the ATS has received in publications in other languages.

103

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 103

21/12/2016 10:11

104  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Demographics In Antarctica scientists have been considered ambassadors by some for their respective countries, a contingency that ultimately transformed the territory into the continent for science. Presently twenty-­nine nations, all of them signatory to the AT, operate through their National Antarctic Program both seasonal-­only (summer) and year-­round research stations in the region covered by the Treaty. The Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs (COMNAP, with its office in Christchurch, New Zealand) lists over 100 facilities at the time of writing. Of these eighty-­two are classified as ‘stations’ and the remainder are called ‘camps’ or ‘refuges’. COMNAP also records the existence of airports, such as Marsh and Rothera with hard runways and refueling facilities, skiways with no facilities and landing facilities at thirty stations for either helicopters and/or fixed-­ wing aircraft in the service of science.2 Of the total number of stations forty-­one are operated year-­round (nine of these on very easily accessible King George Island just off the Antarctic Peninsula); about sixty stations are seasonal-­only facilities. Most stations exist in coastal areas whereas inland continental sites either a distance from the coast or deep in the interior are altogether less than twenty sites. The population engaged in and supporting science or managing and protecting the Antarctic region varies from approximately 1,100 in winter to 4,400 in summer when some nations also have numerous occupied locations such as tent camps, summer-­long temporary facilities, and mobile traverses; in addition, approximately 1,000 personnel, both ship’s crew and scientists ply the waters of the Treaty region conducting research.3 Nine countries boast regularly having each over 100 persons engaged in the peak period, the austral summer that lasts from December to end of February (CIA 2014). The listing of personnel densities does not give a reliable quantitative estimate of research performance, let alone quality, not least because the numbers in some cases reflect a strong mix of political and scientific considerations. The concentration of stations in the Antarctic Peninsula area and along the continent’s coastal rim indicates that easy physical access and hence political expediency rather than criteria of the high potential scientific value have often been the overarching principle when nations have chosen to participate. Science in its own right is never enough to motivate a mobilization of resources and efforts on the scale seen in Antarctica. Constraints on accessibility and logistics are further considerations. You need to be able to access stations every year if you have long-­term use and when many original stations were established air support was BOX 7.1 SUMMER POPULATIONS PER COUNTRY IN ANTARCTICA (ALSO INDICATES INVESTMENT LEVELS) ●

● ● ●

100 persons at peak season: USA (around 1,300), Argentina (> 650), Russia (< 400), Chile (>350), UK (> 200), Australia (c. 200), France (c. 125), Japan (c. 125), and Italy (c. 100). Other countries fall into three categories: 51–100 persons (each) at peak season: China, Germany, India, New Zealand, South Africa, South Korea, Uruguay 25–50 persons (each): Brazil, Ecuador, Norway, Peru, Poland, Spain, Ukraine < 25 persons (each): Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Finland, Romania, Sweden

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 104

21/12/2016 10:11

The continent for science  105 not possible, so places accessible from the sea had to be chosen. A notable trend is that a number of countries are presently investing in the construction of new sophisticated ice-­breakers, or powerful ice strengthened research vessels. Remote sensing will probably become a more prominent mode of observation, reducing the demand for on-­the-­ground presence; nevertheless major investments need to be made in ships capable of operating in the Antarctic Polar Region and upgrading facilities for ship-­to-­shore and intra-­continental transport by air. Such projects require long-­term planning and here we see an uneven development with the US beginning to lag while other non-­claimant countries, such as South Korea, China, and India, are pushing ahead; in terms of its level and spread of scientific engagement China now ranks third after the US and Russia. Claimant countries such as Australia, Chile, France, and the UK are also in the process of creating a new generation of ice breakers/state-­of-­the-­art research vessels, albeit comparatively more slowly. Germany (a non-­claimant) also intends to introduce a new polar-­dedicated icebreaker by 2020.4 Apart from serving science, the expressed motive by some of the newer actors that are forging ahead (viewing Antarctica as a global commons) is also a long-­term strategic interest in gaining a stronger position – should the time come – to engage in future natural resource exploitation. The reason for the trade-­off relationship between science and politics is simple. The continent’s relative isolation from the rest of the world, together with its severe climate and inhospitable physical features, makes it difficult and costly to maintain regular human habitation. Everything has to be brought in from the outside: food, fuel, building materials and all the other items needed for a kind of artificial life support system. What there is in the main is a vast expanse of icy wilderness, the world’s largest desert, with snow in the place of sand. Massive ice sheets cover a rocky landmass larger than Europe, two or more kilometers thick on average – if it melted in its entirety, world sea levels would rise by about 57 meters. The glacial ice only leaves a rim of grim rock, about 0.5 per cent of the entire continental surface, which in turn for the better part of the year is ice logged and surrounded by extensive sea and pack ice. In the austral summer season, however, the scene is one of dramatic natural beauty that nowadays attracts many ship-­borne tourists. Unlike the Arctic, the Antarctic does not and never has had any indigenous human population. Science as Symbolic Political Capital The politics of modern polar research reveals distinct but overlapping periods of development that are marked by changes in the driving forces. In Antarctica an early period of political tensions culminated in the mid-­1950s. Conflicting interests among a few countries with territorial claims as well as an escalation of military and strategic rivalry between the two superpowers – the USA and USSR – had threatened to turn the continent into a free-­for-­all struggle. Politicking continued in as far as the USSR actually had to invite itself to the first organizational meeting for the Antarctic leg of the International Geophysical Year (IGY, 1957–58) in Paris, and some other nations were brought in by the USA to protect its position.5 Thereafter twelve nations prepared for and conducted Antarctic research during the IGY, and following that episode these same nations established the AT, a disarmament treaty that came into force in 1961, which proved instrumental in reducing political

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 105

21/12/2016 10:11

106  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica t­ ensions and sublimating these instead in scientific rivalry and cooperation. The Treaty set forth a viable governance regime for Antarctica outside the UN system and put control in the hands of a limited number of nation states. Thence began a new era marked by relative stability and a strong focus on science. The continent was declared a non-­military zone, the possibility of nuclear-­arms tests and nuclear waste disposal were banned and peace plus science were the key words. Indeed, the performance of substantial research activity in Antarctica became and still is the criterion that qualifies new nations for full-­fledged membership of the ‘club’ responsible for managing Antarctic affairs. Thus science acquired symbolic value as political capital, and in the first decade of the AT it flourished without too many external pressures of a more direct kind. During the 1970s, however, new issues emerged, promoted by economic and environmental motives. A third period began when the spotlight shone intensely on the Antarctic, first with a tortuous process of minerals negotiations that produced a text that was, in 1991, replaced by an environmental protocol with provisions for its own scientific committee to assess the environmental impact of research-­related activities in Antarctica. In the same decade the collapse of the Soviet Union hastened a period of global politics associated with privatized economic globalization. This has also impacted on Antarctica, one effect being an increasing frequency of multinational cooperations and a farming-­ out of logistical and other tasks to private entrepreneurs. In many cases this includes private–public partnerships and infrastructural arrangements that facilitate science. Whereas earlier interests in Antarctica were less diverse and mostly involved nation states ultimately concerned with issues of sovereignty over territory, resource potential, and national prestige, the increasing number and diversity of actors nowadays makes for a wider range of interests. These are not only expressed by states – of which there are now many more, thanks in part to the dissolution of the USSR – but also by more ‘technology-­enabled entities within or below the state level’.6 A combination of technological advance and the interests of profit-­making corporations, it is predicted, will, in the coming decades, put the regions south of 60° S under greater pressure for resource development and possibly undermine the core values – peace, science, and wilderness conservation – enshrined in the AT. The Pivotal Role of Science in the Antarctic Treaty System The Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) comprises the Treaty itself plus subsequent sets of conventions, rules, and measures agreed upon over the years since 1961 by the Parties at the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings (ATCMs), the thirty-­ninth of which was held in Chile in May 2016. It was only in 2004 that institutional continuity between meetings was introduced by establishing the Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty (based in Buenos Aires, Argentina). This unit presently has a staff of nine, assisted by support and project staff. The Secretariat has no executive powers in the Treaty’s name; much of its task is to facilitate exchange of information between AT Consultative Parties (CPs), to collect, store, archive, and make available documents of the ATCMs (now held annually), and to provide and disseminate information about the ATS and Antarctic activities. It also assists host countries to organize and run the ATMs as well as out-­of-­session group meetings. The pivotal role of science in the ATS has been characterized by several writers as the lifeblood or gel of the political regime, for example:

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 106

21/12/2016 10:11

The continent for science  107 ●

‘Science has emerged as the basic international currency for practical influence in Antarctic affairs;7 ●● ‘Antarctic science is the key to international credibility both for a nation within the Antarctic Treaty System and for the Antarctic Treaty within the broader international community of science;8 ● Or, paraphrasing Carl von Clausewitz, strategically, science may be seen as a continuation of politics by other means; compared to other continents, Antarctica stands out as ‘a continent constructed by and for science’.9 To appreciate the dynamics at play one may distinguish between science as a truth-­ seeking/making activity and its role as a proxy for other values such as politics. Science obviously has a dual function in Antarctica. This may be clarified by distinguishing between its practical and its symbolic use, or value.10 Practical-­instrumental research: Aims at solving current problems, be it in the political, economic, administrative, environmental, regulative, or some other sphere. In such cases the research is embodied in and bears the stamp of the institutional arrangements exemplified in mission-­oriented and applied programs, certain forms of monitoring, etc.11 Symbolic-­instrumental research: Intended to demonstrate scientific capacity capable, should the need arise, of being used as a basis for influence in non-­scientific fields. A state sends researchers in order, firstly, to manifest its interest in Antarctic affairs and attachment to the continent; and secondly to express its government’s political will to play an active part in the management of the area. In this latter case the practical scientific component is of secondary importance compared to the symbolic function, although good science should gain a country greater respect. The IGY’s sublimation of political rivalry into scientific competition and cooperation was distinctive. In Antarctica sixty-­eight Antarctic stations (including ones on sub-­ Antarctic islands) were in operation. Britain added a sophisticated geophysical observatory at Halley Bay, an excellent location for observing aurora activity, to its existing stations around the Antarctic Peninsula. The US established a large Antarctic ‘township’, complete with an airfield on the ice, at McMurdo Sound. ‘Operation Deep Freeze’ (1955/56), as the American effort was called, involved nearly 5,000 men, four icebreakers, cargo ships and numerous aircraft. Using McMurdo as a launching pad, five other stations were built, including one at the geographic South Pole (the Amundsen-­Scott research station), where all the sectorial claims of the claimant countries meet – thus symbolically setting the US above all of them. In this sense the pole station is an unmistakeable concretization of US policy not to recognize any existing territorial claims, and to reserve the right to lay its own claims in the future if and whenever this might prove advantageous. The Soviet Union assumed a similar policy, and not to be outdone by the US, the Russians succeeded in the difficult task of establishing a research station at the point on the continent furthest away from any coast (the Pole of Inaccessibility). This too was a geopolitical statement. In addition, four other Soviet stations and staging bases were built, a network of bases fanned across Antarctica, one or more in nearly all the sectors claimed by different countries. These are examples of science in action as symbolic capital in the international political arena. The superpowers were not alone in translating political rivalry into competitive cooperation in science. Australian and some other countries’ concern with Soviet activities

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 107

21/12/2016 10:11

108  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica in East Antarctica influenced the siting strategy for stations in that region. Belgium, a small non-­claimant country was encouraged and welcomed in the West as a latecomer in the Antarctic leg of the IGY because it added a ‘friendly nation’ station on that part of the map. A Belgian team arrived as late as 26 December 1957 and operated the King Baudoin base on a floating ice shelf off Dronning Maud Land until the end of the 1958 austral summer. Two further expeditions were launched, in 1958 and 1959, but then efforts were discontinued in 1961 when the country gained permanent Consultative Status on the Antarctic Treaty as it entered into force. Quite simply, ‘the continuation of Antarctic research did not serve a political interest anymore: Belgium had already secured its place at the negotiating table’.12 Resting on its laurels, Belgium did not pursue independent research activity again until 1985, when it launched a continuous multi-­annual Antarctic science program. Today it boasts the state-­of-­the-­art high tech Princess Elisabeth summer season station intended as a platform for international collaboration. Credit for this is not due to Belgium as such; however, the restart of Belgian activities on the continent came thanks to an initiative by a leading Belgian scientist, Alain Hubert, without political support from his government. Belatedly shamed into providing support even now, the Belgian effort is channeled through an NGO rather than government. The Science Criterion in the Antarctic Treaty In May 1958, the United States invited the eleven other nations that had participated in IGY research to a meeting in Washington that culminated in the signing of the Antarctic Treaty (AT) on 1 December 1959. The Treaty first of all affirms13 that ‘Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only (Art. I)’, while ‘freedom of scientific investigation in Antarctica and cooperation toward that end . . . shall continue (Art. II)’. Further, ‘scientific observations and results from Antarctica shall be exchanged and made freely available (Art. III)’. Adrien Howkins plays up the anti-­colonial theme when he states how the select self-­ elected circle of original signatories used the explicit connection between science and sovereignty as ‘a neat justification for the exclusion of potential “troublemakers”, including both Soviet satellites and the newly independent states of the “Third World” bristling with anti-­imperialism’.14 This view may be moderated by recalling that of the sixty-­five countries that took part in IGY only twelve opted to work in Antarctica. If the other fifty-­three were so interested, as suggested here, one may ask why did they not gain some experience to make their input useful and register their political stake. Obviously other factors also played a role – relative lack of interest on the part of many countries at the time, other political priorities and national traditions in science, combined with the steep cost of participation and budgetary constraints, the latter evidenced even in the case of Sweden.15 Article IV of the Treaty suspends all existing sovereignty claims, neither recognizing them nor rejecting them. Article IX (2) inscribes science as the pivotal inclusion/exclusion criterion, meaning that states could only attain the status of Consultative Parties if they passed an activity test. Politically interested parties should not be embraced as competent decision-­makers unless and during such time that the new Contracting Party ‘demonstrates its interest in Antarctica by conducting substantial scientific research there, such as the establishment of a scientific station or the dispatch of a scientific expedition’. This

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 108

21/12/2016 10:11

The continent for science  109 is the ‘science criterion’ that separates Consultative Parties (CPs) from non-­Consultative Parties. Since the mainstream interpretation for a long time appears to have been that active performance must mostly be an independent or even unaided effort on the part of an individual nation, the criterion fosters nationalism and at first effectively discouraged the introduction of genuinely multi-­or international research platforms of the kind one finds in other areas of Big Science, for example physics (CERN in Geneva) or astronomy (the European Southern Observatory – ESO – with several collaborative facilities in Chile’s clear-­sky deserts). Nowadays, however, some signs of change are notable. Most of the portfolio of Malaysia for its application comes from joint work with Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. For Belarus at present the work is with Russia and it is now commonplace for scientists from a putative CP to work with other countries to develop their science. At the ATCMs the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC) – an NGO that now has (invited) Expert status at the meetings – is, however, largely alone in pleading as a principle of policy for the innovative idea of a paradigm shift towards regular station-­ sharing to reduce scientific duplication and lessen the future environmental footprint attending the constantly growing numbers of new station constructions.16 With Kazakhstan acceding in January 2015 there are now fifty-­one signatories to the AT but only twenty-­nine with voting rights.17 This two-­tier system separates the core group of founding members (twelve) plus whatever ‘new’ states subsequently clear the science hurdle to become additional CPs, (currently seventeen, within a total of twenty-­ nine CPs).18 Interested states acceding to the Treaty who have not satisfied the ‘science criterion’ lack voting rights (currently twenty-­four, so-­called Acceding Parties, or non-­ CPs).19 A Typical approach would be that a country’s scientists join the SCAR, they develop a suitable national Antarctic research program, normally in concert with one or two established CPs and finally take steps to implement it once they have grown their core experienced people. Full Members of SCAR are those countries with active scientific research programs in Antarctica (at the time of writing thirty-­one); and Associate Members are those countries without an independent research program as yet or which are planning a research program in the future (at the time of writing eight).20 The first to be accepted as a new CP was Poland. The case is interesting because it set a precedent for interpreting requirements at that time. Poland applied to join in 1961 on the basis of research activities prior to IGY, but was turned down and put on hold until 1977 when it established an overwintering station (Arctowski) on easily accessible King George Island in the South Shetland Islands group, 130 kilometers to the north of the Antarctic Peninsula. This established a precedent whereupon demonstration of ‘substantial research’ was interpreted to mean the act of establishing a station, a demanding standard requiring financial investments, material resources, logistic support and political will on a scale not readily matched by further states until incentives in the form of potential rewards increased. This incentive came during talks regarding the possibility of developing a minerals convention, in which the idea was floated that in 1991 the AT itself might be revised to close the door on new entrants. Although nothing came of the idea, several nations geared up to establish stations in anticipation. In the decade that followed, from 1980 to 1990, thirteen further countries were added as full members, with Brazil and India (1983) and China (1985) both placing stations on King George Island, and India (1983) on the coast of Dronning Maud Land. Their entry was an important breakthrough that defused the challenge mounted by non-­aligned nations in the UN, spearheaded by

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 109

21/12/2016 10:11

110  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Table 7.1  Three different concepts of internationalism Regime types

ATS

Common heritage

Wilderness

Authority Participation Benefit

Select ‘Club’ Via science Peace, science and marine resources, and oil gas and minerals in future

United Nations Open to all nations Peace, resources for all humankind, with equitable distribution so that the Third World will benefit

UN or ATS Open, or via science Peace, aesthetic values, science, tourism, environment No gas, oil or minerals

Malaysia, to the political legitimacy of the ATS. In parallel with this movement global NGOs with an environmental activist agenda also criticized the system, and alongside the Malaysian proposal of a Heritage of Mankind (and sharing eventual mineral riches) regime advocated another alternative arrangement, the turning of Antarctica into a World Wilderness Park.21 Combined with less rigidity among the ATCPs, external pressures led to several changes in the system, bringing greater transparency and a willingness to adapt to the new geopolitical situation while still upholding the inequality fundamentally inscribed in the system. In 1987 SCAR was granted observer status at the ATCM and gained the right to submit information and working papers. Before this, giving advice was bureaucratically complicated. There was no direct contact with the Executive Officers of the AT other than during the ATCMs. Treaty meetings were, in general, held in odd-­ numbered years, while SCAR met in even-­numbered years. From the outset advice on science was pertinent to international coordination as well as developing guidelines for protecting flora and fauna, but it could only be provided directly through individual Treaty Parties.22 As far as Parties were concerned, before 1987, it seems, most of the SCAR advice came through the UK delegation, as the SCAR Office was in the UK. After 1991 the ATCM was held every year instead of every other year, simplifying the interplay between science and politics. In 1991 The Netherlands successfully tried a new route to fulfilling the ultimate requirement of a strong science portfolio and became a full member on the strength of good marine research and leasing part of the Polish station without setting up its own. This re-­interpretation in the practice of satisfying the ‘science criterion’ is often taken as an important turning point in cooperative efforts, but hitherto very few nations have followed the Dutch example. In 2006 Romania placed a station at the Australian Law Station location, and since 2005 Concordia has been run as a joint French–Italian station. Earlier but less prominent role models of this kind are the joint German–Argentine laboratory at Jubany and the joint Chilean–German observatory at O’Higgens. Also one finds cases of re-­use of a station, such as the UK’s old Adelaide station which was transferred to Chile (in 1984), Faraday to Ukraine (1996), and Hope Bay to Uruguay (1997). The advent of real ‘international’ stations simply under a SCAR flag or the AT’s own emblem still seems a long way off.23 Interestingly, however, it has been suggested that King George Island, with its many stations, may be turned into a single ‘campus’.24

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 110

21/12/2016 10:11

The continent for science  111 The Creation of SCAR and its Long and Reluctant Road to a More Proactive Advisory Role As an interdisciplinary committee under the ICSU umbrella, SCAR inherited the ideal of a clear boundary between science and politics. Already before the existence of the AT, international political realities limited SCAR’s responsibility as one of ‘coordinating’ rather than ‘administrating’ Antarctic science. The term ‘administration’ originally appeared in the draft of SCAR’s statutes tabled in The Hague in 1958, where it was replaced by ‘co-­ordination’, and the rest of the text was carefully sanitized to avoid anything that might imply reference to ‘questions of occupancy’.25 The objection was that the term ‘administration’ could mean that research priorities are solely for scientists to decide, leaving a loophole that went against the grain of sovereignty claims. The Australian delegate elected vice chairman of the Executive Committee insisted that: ‘. . . SCAR needs to be more than usually thoughtful and careful on such questions . . . they are questions of governments, not for scientific bodies’. As to descriptions of tasks of special committees for research in particular disciplines, a clarification was inserted: ‘Special Committees may not act as arbiter between the adhering groups. Any bilateral or multilateral negotiations must take place directly between adhering groups (Note by K.E.B.: It was stated that “groups includes countries”)’.26 This basic philosophy was explicitly reiterated in a SCAR publication entitled Constitution, Procedures and Structure, 1981, in which it was stated that ‘SCAR will abstain from involvement in political and juridical matters, including the formulation of management measures for exploitable resources, except where SCAR accepts an invitation to advise on a problem’.27 From experience SCAR found that the principle of separating science and politics required careful navigation, and tended to press it into a rather reactive position or to find itself sidestepped, as was the case with the report on the minerals exploitation issue it presented to the ninth ATCM in 1977 – a report that the ATCM rejected.28 SCAR’s reactive advice to the Treaty during its first twenty-­five years only changed through a combination of external pressures on the ATS, a relaxation of the science criterion, and SCAR’s internal reorganization and other changes. The latter’s role as science adviser became more systematic and visible when it was given observer status at the ATCMs in 1987, and its role as ‘coordinator’ was professionalized. Critical voices pinpointed deficiencies that required attention, for example how: Politics plays a major part in Antarctic affairs and it must be expected that political considerations will inevitably intrude, in some countries, in the selection of which scientific activities to support. On purely scientific grounds, the evidence of the past 20 years suggests that in some cases a great deal of money has been spent in supporting poor scientific objectives, or activities which are poorly coordinated and apparently represent no plan or systematic effort to fill in clear gaps in our knowledge.29

In 1988, responding to increasing international attention to global climate change as articulated for example in the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme (IGBP) launched by ICSU the year before,30 SCAR formally established the Group of Specialists on Global Change (GLOCHANT) to contribute to that program. It served as a network that brought together specialists from many different disciplines and related sub-­programs

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 111

21/12/2016 10:11

112  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica involved in global change research in the Antarctic and Southern Ocean regions. However it was not until 1997 that SCAR co-­sponsored the first international symposium specifically on the topic at hand, whence it was stated that the GLOCHANT program (now a network with links to about fifteen relevant glaciological, oceanographic, and other programs) ‘had made considerable progress in fostering comprehensive multi-­disciplinary activities and also in providing a focus for increased modelling and the comparison of model results with observations’.31 In the interim a report by an evaluation panel commissioned by ICSU in 1991 to review SCAR’s performance had criticized a ‘clubby’ culture and pointed to the need for organizational changes, in addition to a substantial increase in the annual budget.32 The report was received with scepticism, but in the end some minor changes were made to improve information flow. A new approach to Antarctic science was signalled in 1992, in a report entitled The Role of the Antarctic in Global Change: an International Plan for a Regional Research Programme. But then, largely due to internal inertia, SCAR lapsed back into complacency until 1998 when issues of structure and organization were finally seriously addressed and the organization was put on a new track.33 A restructuring now brought disciplines together in a spirit of cross-­disciplinarity and thematization to form three Standing Scientific Groups (Geosciences, Life Sciences, and Physical Sciences), thus enabling more effective integration with other international and global programs. Apart from providing objective and independent scientific advice to the ATCMs, SCAR nowadays also advises other organisations, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and has developed a research foresight function to periodically identify issues emerging from greater scientific understanding of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean region and brings them to the attention of policy makers.34 The turn to a much more proactive stance and greater visibility occurred in the lead-­up to the Fourth International Polar Year (2007–2008), under the auspices of ICSU and the WMO. This also brought a stronger comparative bi-­polar perspective.35 A critical milestone was SCAR’s Open Science Conference in Bremen, Germany in July 2004, the first of what has become a biennial event. These conferences incorporate many educational and outreach activities as well as support to the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS) that emerged from IPY4. Another sign of SCAR’s new proactive profile has been the development of what now is an attractive and well-­functioning SCAR website that makes it easier for anyone interested to keep abreast of Antarctic research, conference calls and access to the SCAR Bulletin, plus much else. A recent event that is meant to guide Antarctic research agendas is the consultation or Foresight exercise, the Horizon Scan36 to identify the highest priority scientific questions that researchers should aspire to answer in the next two decades and beyond. An initial set of 955 questions were successively reduced (particularly during a four-­day Retreat with seventy-­five attendees) to a manageable battery of eighty key scientific questions clustered into seven topics. The rationale behind the consultation process is the need for a co-­ordinated portfolio of cross-­disciplinary science, based on new models of international collaboration, and the recognition that no scientist, program or nation can realize these aspirations alone. The ‘roadmap’ is politically valuable and demonstrates the integration of SCAR and of science more broadly within the core of the ATS’s legitimacy. It pinpoints knowledge gaps and accents significant research questions in a warming world relating to the atmosphere,

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 112

21/12/2016 10:11

The continent for science  113 the Southern Ocean and sea ice, sea level change, probes further into the continent’s sub-­ glacial topography, changing conditions of biological life, the impact of human presence, and new vistas in Antarctica as a global platform for astronomy and astrophysics. For the social sciences the outstanding issues that appear largely concern international relations, law and tourism studies, questions of governance, security, future pressures on the AT-­ regime owing to the increasing prominence of newer actors on the scene, the impact of new technologies, and how will the use of Antarctica for peaceful purposes and science be maintained as barriers to access change? The focus of the exercise is on predictive aspects, reflecting what natural scientists and politicians want from science while a relative marginalization of participants from the humanities is noticeable in the outcome. Nevertheless, given that natural scientists generally have been slow to accept working together with historians of science and even more so humanities and social sciences, SCAR should be congratulated for the concrete steps it has taken in recent years to move in this direction by establishing two Expert Groups, respectively covering these two scholarly domains.37

II – ADVANCES IN THE KNOWLEDGE CONTENTS OF THE SCIENCE Science for a Continent As a scientific NGO under ICSU’s umbrella SCAR has been and is science driven and thus proactive when it comes to research, but traditionally reactive when it comes to political pressures. Its role as an instrument for environmental management advice existed from the outset – promoted particularly by biologists – but had the character of being preparatory, laying the science base for special measures and new conventions added to the ATS’s organizational architecture wherein new scientific committees also took form to provide advice on specific issues (see below). The environmental thrust depended largely on the initiative of leading scientists and impulses that came through international research programs such as the WCRP (1980) IGBP (1987) and not from the AT, which is an intergovernmental organisation. However, when the latter accommodated to political decisions in a number of CPs to ban Antarctic minerals exploitation, as well as the general world trend that led to the UN’s Rio Declaration on Environment and Development in 1992, the formulation of the Madrid Protocol the year before marked a turning point. As will be described below, SCAR’s scientific input in the course of this process was significant but not always heeded, and afterwards the function of advice on environmental management issues was taken over by a special committee created for this purpose within the framework of the Protocol. Given that the present chapter is meant to characterize Antarctica as a continent for science, it is important here not only to fix on the political dimension, but also to provide some highlights in the recent history of that science in context.38 New technologies, such as radar, initially developed during World War II, and later the Cold War focus on placing the Earth under surveillance using satellites and remote sensing technologies, became important tools both in the Arctic and Antarctic. During the past couple of decades historians have increasingly demonstrated how the politics of the Cold War has had a bearing on research in various natural sciences, including the geosciences, and how Earth

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 113

21/12/2016 10:11

114  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica surveillance technologies since the 1980s have helped boost the environmental thrust as evidenced, for example, in research on climate change.39 During the IGY research in Antarctica was designed to increase knowledge about its topography, the ice volume and what lies below the ice sheets. During the first few decades after 196140 research in atmospheric and geological sciences played a crucial role in two exciting lines of inquiry: plate tectonics and atmospheric processes.41 Ground penetrating radar, widely used in aerial surveys over vast areas of Antarctica, provided much more detailed sub-­glacial bedrock profiles. Traverses collected a wide range of data, including on snow accumulation and ice thickness, crucial for understanding the ice sheet mass balance and ultimately also its implications for global sea level change. Meteorites were collected in certain regions and catalogued, and studies made of their relation to glaciological processes. The geology and palaeontology of mountain ranges and large nunataks protruding through the ice sheet as well as in the Dry Valleys contributed to a better understanding of the geodynamic evolution of different regions. It also became evident that exploitation of land-­based minerals was financially and logistically unviable, but there was speculation that harvesting of ice as a renewable water resource might become an interesting prospect for the future. Inventories of Antarctic birds increased knowledge about the richness of wildlife. Biological antifreeze mechanisms in fish were studied. Features of the oceans surrounding Antarctica became better known from the voyages of various expeditions, particularly Soviet ones. Antarctic rock and sediment deposit sampling added to knowledge on the history of the formation of the continent and the development of deep sediments. Major studies of the Scotia Arc area based on drilling into sediment at the sea bottom and studies on asymmetric sea-­floor spreading helped clarify aspects of the split-­up of Gondwanaland. By the early 1980s changes in the sea ice had also begun to be charted using space-­orbiting satellite sensing. A stocktaking symposium in 1977 on Antarctic geosciences produced a huge volume of over 1,150 pages presenting new findings and identifying questions for further research in this area alone.42 In other areas the numbers of publications and topics had multiplied. The IGY was very focused on the earth sciences, but in the decade that followed biology received increasing attention. In 1962 Rachel Carson sounded a bell in her book Silent Spring. Together with the consolidation of systems ecology this helped pave the way for ICSU’s International Biological Programme (IBP 1964–74) and UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB, initiated 1971).43 The community of biologists’ preoccupation with the probability that humankind was beginning to modify the biosphere as a whole and some natural ecosystems in particular44 also had repercussions on Antarctic research wherein SCAR, as already indicated, helped translate conservation principles into guidelines for environmental management. A study (Budd 1986) of Antarctic science publications for the period 1966–1980 reveals a fairly constant productivity averaging at just above 2,000 items a year. Biological sciences dominated (averaging to 28.8 per cent of the total number of publications), followed by geological sciences (18.4 per cent), and snow and ice or glaciology (10.7 per cent). Thereafter came meteorology (8.3 per cent), atmospheric physics (7.8 per cent) and oceanography (6 per cent). In terms of national origins a count of publications appearing between 1962 and 1972 indicated a pattern where three countries produced the bulk – the US (36 per cent), the USSR (27 per cent) and the UK (12 per cent). Thereafter came New Zealand, France, and Japan.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 114

21/12/2016 10:11

The continent for science  115 Apart from basic research there was also mandated research to serve the parties to the AT with expertise needed for decisions on protection of the environment, particularly Antarctic flora and fauna, as well as a scientific basis for guidelines in the management of marine resources. At the first ATCM (1961) SCAR was explicitly recognized for its role of fostering international cooperation in the field of science and its concern for conservation of fauna and flora was taken to heart, leading to the adoption at the third ATCM in 1964 of a Recommendation of the Treaty, the so-­called ‘Agreed Measures’ on this issue, based on a set of conservation principles prepared by SCAR. The Agreed Measures prohibited the killing of any native mammal or bird; called upon governments to minimize harmful interference with the normal conditions of wildlife and alleviate coastal pollution; made provision for Specially Protected Areas; and regulated the introduction of non-­indigenous species.45 The Agreed Measures of 1964 were noteworthy also because the first of the series of agreements taken altogether make up the ATS. At the fourth ATCM in 1966, fifteen new protected areas were designated. SCAR’s WG on Biology and its concern over possible unsustainable sealing based on the pilot sealing expedition by Norway in 1964 led to what became the first of the additional Conventions to the Treaty, namely, the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals (CCAS, agreed to in 1972). The next major agreement was the Convention for Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR, signed in 1980, and came into force 1982). This Convention has its own scientific committee wherein SCAR has observer status. The scientific background was a huge multinational ten-­year project on marine resource data that was initiated by SCAR scientists in 1976 under the acronym BIOMASS (Biological Investigations of Marine Antarctic Systems and Stocks). Thereafter came the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities (CRAMRA) that gained a consensus in 1988, but never came into force and was rapidly eclipsed by the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (Madrid Protocol, agreed 1991 and implemented 1998). In both cases SCAR provided scientific input. Its first report submitted during the minerals negotiation process was deemed politically unacceptable due to strong opposition from the USSR whence the ATCPs set up their own Intergovernmental Group of Experts that produced a parallel report.46 The crafting of the Madrid Protocol benefited from SCAR’s initial review, and has a Committee for Environmental Protection (CEP) that develops scientific advice independent of SCAR, but nevertheless consults the latter organization on specific issues such as protected areas and also more controversial questions such as marine acoustic impacts and bio-­prospecting. To systematize its consultative role SCAR for its part established a Standing Committee on the Antarctic Treaty System (SCATS). It is the body now tasked with developing SCAR’s scientific advice to the ATCM and its CEP as well as to CCAMLAR, CCAS and the Advisory Committee to the Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels (ACAP). Science for the Globe From the late 1980s Antarctic science was gradually integrated into what was later called Integrated Earth Systems Science (IESS). This epistemic turn began with closer interplay in the 1980s with global research programs such as the World Climate Research

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 115

21/12/2016 10:11

116  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Programme (WCRP), established in 1980, and the International Geosphere-­Biosphere Programme (IGBP), launched in 1987. The latter was tasked to coordinate international research on a global-­scale and regional-­scale interactions between Earth’s biological, chemical and physical processes and their interactions with human systems. The discovery in 1985 of the depletion of stratospheric ozone (the ozone hole) over Antarctica drew worldwide attention and paved the road to the Montreal Protocol (1987) that banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons. The birth of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 symbolized further change in the direction of a more-­integrated cross-­disciplinary approach to science. A second important event was the multinational European project for deep ice core drilling in Antarctica (EPICA), a collective research effort that ran from 1996 to 2006.47 Apart from the vast number of multi-­authored high-­impact scientific publications it produced, EPICA signified a new form of international scientific rivalry in part driven by national or regional (EU) prestige. Deep ice core drilling and the ability to contribute to a better understanding of climate change by investigations into past variations in temperature and levels of ‘greenhouse’ gases from the archives of the ice sheets via cores was at the same time a mark of scientific prowess. EPICA brought together twelve partners from ten different countries and involved drilling at two different sites to retrieve past climate records vital for understanding current climatic changes. Operations at Dome C made headlines when publications showed profiles of changing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere over more than 800,000 years, twice as long as the periods covered in previous projects. Ice cores from the Kohnen station on Dronning Maud Land made it possible to study the effect of the neighbouring ocean and eventual coupling of climate changes between northern and southern hemispheres. During this period, apart from EPICA, several other deep ice-­coring projects were initiated by other nations, for example, the collaborative ice-­drilling project between Russia, the United States, and France at the Russian Vostok station in East Antarctica and the Japanese station at Dome Fuji, one of the coldest places on Earth. Recently China has also gotten into the game, initiating a deep ice-­core drilling project at Dome A on the highest plateau of the Antarctic ice sheet; this programme is expected to continue until 2018.48 A dramatic event in the austral summer of 2002 was the sudden collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf of the Antarctic Peninsula. Satellite images of the region were spread worldwide. In the meantime more knowledge was also gained on the interconnection of a vast network of Antarctic sub-­glacial lakes of which Lake Vostok is the largest. Later, satellite data also revealed that the ice sheet is changing, at a pace more rapid than anticipated and the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WIAS) subsequently became an object of much research including ice coring, and uncertainties regarding future scenarios caused some frustration within the IPCC’s assessment process.49 Coastal-­change and glaciological maps of Antarctica have continually improved and observations of past sub-­glacial volcanic activities have added further knowledge regarding the past history of the continent, as have paleovegetation studies. Atmospheric chemists probe the distribution and variability of ozone in the polar upper troposphere – lower stratosphere region and the feedbacks of ozone changes to polar climate. Biologists have studied the effect of UV-­B irradiation on the growth and survival of Antarctic marine

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 116

21/12/2016 10:11

The continent for science  117 diatoms, as well as more general biodiversity and various aspects of adaptation to climate change of ecosystems and their resilience; Antarctic birds, for example, have been found to breed later. Meteorologists have constructed simulation models of local conditions and of katabatic winds. Research on the Southern Ocean as a carbon sink and its role in the Earth system as a driver of global weather and climate continues to occupy researchers from many disciplines. The great variety of research topics is too numerous to cite here. Instead, reference should be made to the SCAR strategic plan 2004–2010. Decided upon in 2004, it lists five ‘approved Scientific Research Programmes’, relating, respectively, to subglacial lakes, Antarctica and the global climate system, Antarctic climate evolution, evolution and biodiversity, as well as solar–terrestrial interactions. Since then a further development of the strategic plan 2011–2016 has not only refined the key science areas but also provided an explicit link to their value to policy makers.50 One further highlight of remarkable Antarctic science must be mentioned, namely, the multinational effort during the recent Polar Year to gather information about the Gamburtsev Mountain Range a sub-­glacial mountain range located in Eastern Antarctica. Located beneath up to 3 kilometers of ice these mountains were analyzed by a team of scientists from seven nations in light aircraft, using specialist radar and other equipment. They are now thought to represent the birthplace of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. After examining the data, researchers discovered how, during the last billion years, a crustal root was formed underneath the mountains and the rift system in the East Antarctic. This fracture stretched 3,000 kilometers, all the way to India. It is believed the rift may have been created about 250 million years ago, during the breakup of the ancient supercontinent Gondwanaland. This recent discovery adds an important piece to the puzzle of the Earth’s geological history and its Antarctic cryosphere. In the period reviewed here the turn to interdisciplinarity based on an integrated view that includes atmosphere, land and ocean was increasingly recognized in Antarctic research, to the extent that during the fourth IPY the term Antarctic Integrated System Science gained ascendency. A research portfolio under this heading characteristically includes projects involving glaciology, geology, biology, atmospheric and ocean sciences.51 Research Performance Indicators, Need for Greater Accountability and Station-­sharing In recent years bibliometric studies have begun counting the increasing numbers of scientific articles on Antarctic topics and ranking countries in terms of their ­productivity.52 Of course there are many problems with such studies in as far as they mainly rely on the Web of Science database of publications, which is strongly skewed in favour of English-­ language papers. Academic publishing houses charge high prices for subscriptions to major international journals and this also limits access to current Antarctic literature by scientific communities in countries with relatively poorer funding, and makes it more difficult for their scientists to participate on equal terms in the publication of papers in highly visible journals. A further problem is that while the Web of Science database affords analytical tools for sophisticated analysis, difficulties arise if one wants to combine or incorporate information from more inclusive databases, such as the Antarctic Bibliography (last updated 2011, part of the Cold Regions Database), that permit, for example, keyword (tracking) searches but lack the more advanced data processing and visualization functions associated with SCI-­based analyses.53 Scientometric measures

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 117

21/12/2016 10:11

118  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica only give us pictures of the relative visibility of authors and institutions, although they remain a promising tool in several ways. Keyword searches also permit tracking of research trends and topics. Cozzens54 tracked atmospheric and geological sciences in the 1970s, demonstrating the rising importance of plate tectonics and atmospheric processes. Recent studies such as Qing55 and Walton56 confirm some of the trends described above. Papers that reap very high citation scores deal with the ‘ozone hole’, uv-­radiation and its impact on biota, deep ice cores and what they tell about past atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, the history of Antarctic g­ laciation and climate change, but also sometimes with less obviously politically significant ­questions such as the breakup of Gondwanaland and sub-­glacial geology. One can also see a steadily growing increase in numbers of papers and a definite indication of more ­cross-­country co-­authoring, indicating greater multinational collaborations and how Antarctic research has entered general journals with high impact (Nature and Science) and broad mainstream disciplinary journals (Geophysical Research Letters). Ultimately this trend is a good scientific incentive for increased station-­sharing. Attention to scientific quality and accountability may be increased through active peer pressure by the introduction by CPs of international peer reviews of their national research programs and to make the results available to the other countries as Finland has done.57 In an Information Paper submitted at the recent ATCM in Brazil 2014 the environmentalist NGO, ASOC (2014), followed up on this idea and suggests a more rational use of infrastructural investments and the articulation of a clear policy of station-­sharing, arguing that this should benefit both science and environmental protection. Although care must be taken in using numbers to compare the performance of different countries, bibliometric reviews can be useful to stimulate discussions of accountability – what countries are most active scientifically and which ones fail to live up to their commitments as Consultative Parties? The top five producers of scientific papers are the USA, UK, Australia, Germany, and Italy. They account for about 65 per cent of the total output of articles traceable in the SCI,58 with the USA (26 per cent) leading by far. The next group of countries includes France, Japan, New Zealand, and Spain. Below them Argentina and the Netherlands hold steady while China and India have climbed upward, while South Africa and Russia have proportionately declined from their previous positions.59 Of the top twenty-­five producers all but three are CPs. The cases of Canada, Switzerland and Denmark (non-­CPs or not parties at all) are interesting in that they show how expertise in these countries (for example, ice core analysis in the latter two) makes their scientists attractive collaborative partners for colleagues in the top-­ranking countries. One may also conclude that investments in infrastructures do not necessarily correlate with high scientific productivity (see, Table I – demographics – with the just cited bibliometric findings). When it comes to diplomatic activity as reflected in the production of Working Papers submitted to the ATCMs, the UK stands out, followed by New Zealand and then Australia. These three former British Empire countries with long Antarctic traditions together count for 42 per cent of the WPs for the whole period 1992–2010, while the fourteen least-­involved CPs contribute fewer than 7 per cent of the WPs.60 There appears to be a clear correlation between scientific productivity and WP productivity. The leaders and laggards tend to be the same in both arenas. The top ten Parties on the ATS activity scale consist of all seven claimant nations plus the USA and Russia (who, as already noted, both reserve the right to make claims). The conclusion is that ‘at present the Treaty

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 118

21/12/2016 10:11

The continent for science  119 remains effectively a select club dominated by the claimant nations and the Cold War warriors (USA and Russia), and that the return on the investment in Antarctic activities in terms of significant science or political initiatives seems lacking for several countries’.61

CONCLUDING REMARKS The Charter of the AT gives the performance of research a pivotal role. As such it promotes the advancement of science on the continent and its surrounding oceans as a primary task that at the same time endows individual nation-­states with international special status and undergirds the legitimacy of the ATS as a governance regime. In other words, research there in its knowledge-­enhancing function simultaneously takes on a political dimension. In this respect, to say that in Antartica and its environs science is a continuation of politics by other means is appropriate.62 The proposition should, however, not be interpreted to mean that, in principle, the relationship is detrimental to science, on the contrary. If a country’s researchers produce and disseminate good-­quality science that achievement bears well on its government’s standing and prowess within the collective intergovernmental framework, the ATS, while a country with a poor science record is frowned upon by many of its peers. It is the character and evolution of this complexly mediated relationship between science and politics/policy that this chapter set out to explore, clarifying how, because of the former’s pivotal position, one may speak, historically, of Antarctica as a continent in a sense constructed by and for science. In this perspective a second task in this chapter is to highlight some of the substance of that science and visible shifts in research agendas during the Cold War and beyond. It also follows that considerable attention in the chapter is devoted to the formulation and interpretation(s) of what I call the ‘science criterion’ and its subsequent modes of implementation. Consequently there is a strong focus on SCAR and its relationship to the ATS, noting how SCAR at first was proactive only in respecting science, but reactive when it came to policy advice. This position changed only in the wake of a general world trend in the academic sphere whereby interdisciplinary and trans-­disciplinary modes of research became more prominent, a process reflecting greater and more conscious emphasis on science for policy alongside the more traditional ideal of policy for science (Elzinga 2012b). Of course, historically, institutional motives, such as mapping the world’s natural resources, economic gain, and military–political advantage, have always served as significant incentives for countries to pursue research, but the advent of inter-­and trans-­ disciplinary work coincided with the emergence of increasing concerns with principles of nature conservation and environmental protection. In the case of Antarctica this has meant that apart from a strong focus on the geosciences and military–strategic filiations in the early stages of the Cold War, with science becoming a form of symbolic capital in a geopolitical arena, during the late 1970s and the 1980s increasing attention was also given to environmental research. Initiatives taken under the auspices of ICSU and the WMO in the form the WCRP (launched 1980) and the IGBP (1987) also influenced the role of SCAR. This latter trend came at a time when the ATS also began a process of change that involved more countries coming on board as CPs and in the early 1990s the adoption of the Protocol on Environmental Protection.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 119

21/12/2016 10:11

120  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica In the course of these developments SCAR, as the ambassador of science within the Treaty system, adopted a more strategic and thematic interdisciplinary approach wherein the focus on environmental and climatic research and ultimately the notion of an Integrated Earth System Science (IESS) left a significant imprint. At the same time its role in delivering policy advice has become stronger and more proactive. In continuation of these changes the issue of early peer review only flagged by a number of outstanding science-­performing nations, now in tandem with a prevalent trend of using bibliometric surveys and performance measures has also entered discussions of scientific quality relating to Antarctic research. Another discussion that has been around for some time relates to the politically delicate issue of station-­sharing, with arguments not only of cutting costs and enhancing collaboration between nations, but also that it benefits both the quality of research and protection of Antarctica’s wilderness qualities. Finally, the entry of bibliometrics and the discussions it prompts is another indication of how fulfilling the science criterion continues fundamentally to be a political act.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to David D. Walton and Andrew Gray at the British Antarctic Survey for their generous comments on a draft version of this chapter. Thanks are also due to Peder Roberts whose trusty editorial hand and perceptive remarks further benefited the text.

NOTES  1. Bergu˜ho 2011.   2. COMNAP 2014.   3. During the austral summer season tourists come and go, their total number counted over the whole season is roughly eight times the number of scientists and support staff.   4. South Korea already has its first ice-­breaking vessel, the Araon, in use since late 2009 for supply and transport plus state-­of-­the-­art research facilities; regarding China, a second icebreaker expected 2016/17 will greatly boost the country’s polar research capability – the new vessel will surpass the Xuelong in service since 1993; China has also recently created an Antarctic air squadron including a fixed-­wing aircraft to support its scientific expeditions into the interior; India intends to launch its first research-­cum-­supply vessel for polar operations 2016/17, obviating the country’s reliance hitherto on chartered polar ships and greatly enhancing its scientific research capacity; Australia has a new vessel expected to be ready in 2019, with greater ice-­breaking capacity than the Aurora Australis, it will be able to take a greater payload, and feature the latest state-­of-­the-­art laboratories on board for research; France has a new polar logistics vessel under construction to come on line 2017; the UK is constructing a new vessel that will ultimately fulfill the roles of two UK polar ships, James Clark Ross and Ernest Shackleton, and is expected to be ready for service in 2019; Germany intends to have a future icebreaker due to enter service in 2019/2020, supplementing the Polarstern; Chile will have a new vessel to be delivered in 2021, rivaling Argentina’s Almirante Irizar, currently the largest icebreaker in South America.   5. Bulkeley 2008.   6. Hemmings 2012.   7. Herr and Hall 1989, 13.   8. Quilty 1990, 29.   9. Elzinga 1993. 10. Bohlin 1991; Østreng 1989. 11. Elzinga and Bohlin 1989. 12. Abbink 2009, 60. 13. Auburn 1982.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 120

21/12/2016 10:11

The continent for science  121 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Howkins 2011, 81. Elzinga 2007. ASOC 2014. Antarctic Treaty Secretariat 2015. The 29 Consultative Parties: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea (ROK), Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Poland, Russian Federation, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States and Uruguay. The 24 non-­Consultative Parties: Austria, Belarus, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Guatemala, Hungary, Iceland, Kazakhstan, North Korea (DPRK), Malaysia, Monaco, Mongolia, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Portugal, Romania, Slovak Republic, Switzerland, Turkey and Venezuela. SCAR 2014. See further Elzinga 1993. Bonner 1993; Walton 2011. In the case of the Netherlands it must be pointed out how the principle of mutual benefit played in. For one, the ATS could now embrace a small but leading scientific nation that excelled in marine research. Secondly an economic crisis in Poland culminated in 1989, creating a situation where the Poles sorely needed hard (dollar) currency. Renting out part of their Arctowsky station to the Dutch was propitious, while for the Dutch in turn it afforded a window of opportunity that helped ease them into the ATS. Hemmings 2011; Elzinga 2013. Bullen 1958; see further Elzinga 2013. Bullen 1958. Zumberge 1986, 157. Bonner 1993. Walton 1987, p. 59. In 1987 the then President Claude Lorius expressed concern at the growing pressure on SCAR from other organizations and believed that SCAR would need to make a conscious decision on the extent of its international role or whether it should retain a low profile as stated in the introduction to the Constitution. In 1988 the new Group of Specialists on Environmental Affairs and Conservation was established with W.N. Bonner as convener. GLOCHANT 1997. Colwell 1993. Walton 2011. http://www.scar.org/policy-­advice. cf. Krupnik et al. 2011. Kennicutt et al. 2014. http://www.scar.org/historygroup; http://www.scar.org/hasseg. Cf. Walton 1987 and 2013. Doel 1997; Doel 2003; Oreskes and Krige 2014; Turchetti and Roberts 2014. Walton 1987; Hansom and Gordon 2013. Cozzens 1981. Cradock 1982. The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, having met at Stockholm from 5 to 16 June 1972 was a milestone in opinion building more generally. Unesco 1993. Bonner 1993. Bonner 1993, p. 106. Elzinga 2012a. Zhang 2014. O’Reilly et al. 2012. SCAR 2011. NSF 2007. The most recent study covers the period 1993–2012 (Qing et al. 2014) and two earlier ones cover, respectively, 1980–2003 (Dastidar and Persson 2005) and 1980–2004 (Dastidar 2007). All three use the Science Citation/Web of Science database. There are also two country-­specific studies of scientific output. One (Walton 2008) is on the performance of the British Antarctic Survey (using an internal BAS publication list) and more generally the UK as a whole. The author compares UK disciplinary outputs and international prominence vis à vis world total publications (using SCI/Web of Science), and he comments on the findings of Dastidar and Persson (2005) and Dastidar (2007). The other case study (Stefenon 2013) is on Brazil, tracing the ups and downs of that country’s performance. Dudeney and Walton (2012) provides a first analysis of the relative frequency with which Consultative Parties have contributed Working Papers

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 121

21/12/2016 10:11

122  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

to the ATCMs for the period 1992–2010, as a rough proxy for their relative degree of leadership and ­engagement in the AT-­governance regime. Walton 2008. Cozzens 1981. Qing 2014. Walton 2008. Walton 2012. Dastidar 2007. Qing 2014 compared to Dastidar 2007. Walton 2012. Ibid., p. 7. Elzinga 1993.

REFERENCES Abbink, P. 2009. Antarctic Policymaking and Science in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany (1957–1990). Groningen: University of Groningen. Antarctic Treaty Secretariat 2015. Parties, http://www.ats.aq/devAS/ats_parties.aspx?lang=e . ASOC 2014. New Antarctic stations: Are they justified? Information Paper 73, submitted to XXXVII ATCM (Brasilia), http://www.asoc.org/storage/documents/Meetings/ATCM/XXXVII/ATCM37_ip073_e.pdf. Auburn, F.M. 1982. Antarctic Law & Politics. London: C. Hurst & Co. Bergu˜ho, J. 2011. The search for an organizational framework for Antarctic research (1948–1985). Pages 43–54 in Lüdecke, C., Tipton-­Everett, L. and Lay, L. (eds). National and Trans-­National Agendas in Antarctic Research from the 1950s and Beyond. Columbus, Ohio: Byrd Polar Research Center, The Ohio State University, Technical Report No. 2011–01. Berkman, P.A., Michael A. Lang, David W.H. Walton, and Oran Young (eds) (2011). Science Diplomacy. Antarctic, Science, and the Governance of International Spaces. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Scholarly Press. Bohlin, I. 1991. Om polarforskning. Göteborg: Department of Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg, Report No.167, 1991. Bonner, N. 1993. The science/politics interface in development. Pages 103–10 in Elzinga, A. (ed.). Changing Trends in Antarctic Research. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Budd, W.F. 1986. The Antarctic Treaty as a Scientific Mechanism (Post-­IGY) – Contributions of Antarctic Research. Pages 103–51 in Polar Research Board, National Academy of Sciences, Antarctic Treaty System. An Assessment, Washington DC: National Academy Press. Bulkeley, R. 2008. Aspects of the Soviet IGY. Russian Journal of Earth Sciences, Vol. 10: ES1003, doi:10.2205/2007ES000249. Bullen, K.E. 1958. Meetings of the Special Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR) at the Hague, February 2–6, 195. Archive of the Australian Academy of Science. Series MS53, Box 2, Folder 11. G/5. CIA 2014. World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-­world-­factbook/geos/ay.html. Clarkson, P.D. 2006. A brief account of the evolution of SCAR, 1958–2006. http://www.scar.org/scar_media/ documents/aboutscar/Evolution_of_SCAR_1958–2006.pdf. Colwell, R. 1993. Some views on Antarctic research. Pages 140–49 in Elzinga, A. (ed.). Changing Trends in Antarctic Research. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. COMNAP 2014. Main Antarctic Facilities Antarctic_Facilities_List_13Feb2014.xls. Cozzens, S.E. 1981. Citation analysis of Antarctic research. Antarctic Journal (Review): 233–5. Craddock, C. (ed.) 1982. Antarctic Geoscience. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press. Dastidar, P.G. 2007. National and institutional productivity and collaboration in Antarctic science: an analysis of 25 years of journal publications (1980–2004). Polar Research 26: 175–80. Dastidar, P.G. and Persson, O. 2005. Mapping the global structure of Antarctic research vis-­à-­vis Antarctic Treaty System. Current Science 89(9): 1552–4. Doel, R.E. 1997. The Earth sciences and geophysics. Pages 361–8 in John Krige and Dominique Pestre (eds). Science in the Twentieth Century. London: Harwood Academic Publishers. Doel, R.E. 2003. Constituting the postwar earth sciences: The military influence on the environmental sciences in the USA after 1945. Social Studies of Science 33(5): 635–66. Dudney, J.R. and Walton, D.W.H. 2012. Leadership in politics and science within the Antarctic Treaty. Polar Research 31: http://www.polarresearch.net/index.php/polar/article/view/11075/html. Elzinga, A. 1993. Antarctica: the construction of a continent by and for science. Pages 73–106 in Crawford,

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 122

21/12/2016 10:11

The continent for science  123 E., Shinn, T. and Sörlin, T. (eds). Denationalizing Science, The Contexts of International Scientific Parctice. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Elzinga, A. 2012a. Some aspects in the history of ice core drilling from IGY to EPICA. Pages 86–115, in Lüdecke, C., Tipton-­Everett, L. and Lay, L. (eds). National and Trans-­National Agendas in Antarctic Research from the 1950s and Beyond. Columbus, Ohio: Byrd Polar Research Center, The Ohio State University, Technical Report No. 2011–01. Elzinga, A. 2012b. Features of the current science policy regime: Viewed in historical perspective. Science and Public Policy 39: 416–28. Elzinga, A. 2013. Rallying around a flag? On the persistent gap in scientific internationalism between word and deed. Pages 193–219, in Brady, A.-­M. (ed.). The Emerging Politics of Antarctica. London: Routledge. Elzinga, A. and Bohlin, I. 1989. The politics of science in polar regions. Ambio 18(1): 71–6 – republished in Elzinga, A. (ed.), Changing Trends in Antarctic Research. Dordrecht: Kluwer. GLOCHANT/SCAR 1997. Antarctic and Global Change Symposium held in Hobart 13–18 July 1997, in Newsletter of the SCAR Global Change Programme No. 3, October 1997. Hemmings, A.D. 2011. Why did we get an International Space Station before an International Antarctic Station? The Polar Journal 1(1): 5–16. Hemmings, A.D. 2012. Considerable values in Antarctic. The Polar Journal 2(1): 139–56. Herr, R. and Hall, B. 1989. Science as currency and the currency of science. Pages 13–24 in Handmer , J. (ed.). Antarctica. Policies and Policy Development. Canberra: Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University. Howkins, A. 2011. British Antarctic Science, 1939–1959. Pages 72–85, in Lüdecke, C., Tipton-­Everett, L. and Lay, L. (eds). National and Trans-­National Agendas in Antarctic Research from the 1950s and Beyond. Columbus, Ohio: Byrd Polar Research Center, The Ohio State University, Technical Report No. 2011–01. IAATO 2014. Tourism Statistics. http://iaato.org/tourism-­statistics. Kennicutt, M.C., et al. 2014. A roadmap for Antarctic and Southern Ocean science for the next two decades and beyond. Antarctic Science. http://epic.awi.de/36301/1/2014_Kennicutt_AntSci_HorizonScan.pdf Krupnik, I., Allison, I., Bell, R., Kutler, P., David Hik, D., López-­Martinez, J., Rachold, V., Saruhanian, E. and Summerhayes, C. (eds) 2011. Understanding Earth’s Polar Challenges: International Polar Year 2007–2008. Summary of the IPY Joint Committee. Edmonton, Alta: CCI Press. Lüdecke, C. 2011. Parallel precedents for the Antarctic Treaty. Pages 253–63 in Berkman, P.A., M.A. Lang, D.W.H. Walton and O. Young (eds). Science Diplomacy. Antarctic, Science, and the Governance of International Spaces. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Scholarly Press. Lüdecke, C., Tipton-­Everett, L. and Lay, L. (eds) 2011. National and Trans-­National Agendas in Antarctic Research from the 1950s and Beyond. Columbus, Ohio: Byrd Polar Research Center, The Ohio State University, Technical Report No. 2011–01. http://kb.osu.edu/dspace/handle/1811/53605. NSF, Office of Polar Programs 2007. Setting a Course for Antarctic Integrated System Science. http://www.pdfio. net/k-­17882086.html. O’Reilly, J., Oreskes, N., and Oppenheimer, M. 2012. The rapid disintegration of projections: The West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Social Studies of Science 42(5): 709–31. Oreskes, N. and Krige. J. (eds) (2014). Science and Technology in the Global Cold War. Cambridge. MA: MIT Press. Østreng, W. 1989. Polar science and politics. Close twins or opposite poles in international cooperation. Pages 88–113 in Andresen, S. and Østreng. W. (eds). International Resource Management: The Role of Science and Politics. London: Belhaven Press. Qing Ji, Xiaoping Pang, and Xi Zhao 2014. A bibliometric analysis of research on Antarctica during 1993–2012. Scientometrics 101(3): 1925–39. Quilty, P.G. 1990. Antarctica as a continent for science. Pages 29–37 in Herr, R.A, Hall, H.R. and Haward, M.G. (eds). Antarctic Future. Continuity or Change? Hobart: Australian Institute of International Affairs. SCAR 2011. Antarctic Science and Policy Advice in a Changing World. Strategic Plan 2011–2016. Cambridge: Scott Polar Research Institute. http://www.scar.org/scar_media/documents/publications/SCAR_Strat_ Plan_2011–16.pdf. SCAR 2014. Members and officers. http://www.scar.org/members-­and-­officers. Stefenon, V.M., Roesch, L.F.W. and Oereira, A.B. 2013. Thirty years of Brazilian research in Antarctica: ups, downs and perspectives. Scientometrics 95(1): 325–31. Turcetti, S. and Roberts, P. (eds) 2014. The Surveillance Imperative. Geosciences during the Cold War and Beyond. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. UNESCO 1993. Report from the Man and the Biosphere (MAB) ICSU/SCOPE Evaluation Committee (Paris: Unesco Headquarters). http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0009/000965/096549eb.pdf. Walton, D.W.H. (ed.) 1987. Antarctic Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walton, D.W.H. 2010. Trends and patterns in publication of Antarctic science. Pages 161–75 in Campbell, S. and

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 123

21/12/2016 10:11

124  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Maloney. E. (eds). Currents of Change, The Future of Polar Information. Edmonton: University of Alberta, Canadian Circumpolar Library Press. Walton, D.W.H. 2011. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research and the Antarctic Treaty. Pages 75–88, in Berkman, P.A., M.A. Lang, D.W.H. Walton, and O. Young (eds). Science Diplomacy. Antarctic, Science, and the Governance of International Spaces. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Scholarly Press. Walton, D.W.H. (ed.) 2013. Antarctica. Global Science from a Frozen Continent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zhang, N., An, C., Fan, X., Shi, G., Li, C., Liu, J., Hu, Z., Talalay, P., Sun, Y. and Li, Y. 2014. Chinese First Deep Ice-­Core Drilling Project DK–1 at Dome A, Antarctica (2011–2013): progress and performance. Annals of Glaciology 55(68): pp. 88–98. http://www.igsoc.org/annals/55/68/a68a006.pdf. Zumberge, J.H. 1986. The Antarctic Treaty as a scientific mechanism – The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research and the Antarctic Treaty System. Pages 153–91, in Polar Research Board, National Academy of Sciences. Antarctic Treaty System. An Assessment, Washington DC: National Academy Press.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 124

21/12/2016 10:11

8.  Mediating Antarctica in digital culture: politics of representation and visualisation in art and science Juan Francisco Salazar

INTRODUCTION The point of departure chosen for this chapter is an epistemological one: Antarctica is arguably the most mediated place in the world, and as Elena Glasberg contends, ‘more than for any other place on Earth, visual mediation defines and has created the territory of Antarctica’.1 The geopolitics of knowledge of the Antarctic is, in other words, intimately related to the politics of its representation. From the realm of the imaginary, through direct scientific observation, and increasingly via remote sensing, the Antarctic region is exposed though very particular logics of representation, and through an array of lenses, sensing devices, and technologies of representation. This chapter is concerned with the ways through which the Antarctic is continually sampled through a diversity of technologies of calculation and measurement, and also imagined across distinctive sites of sight; a diversity of gazes – and gazing bodies – that cut across a range of practices of enquiry and modes of knowledge production. In the imperial imaginary of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Antarctic was most markedly conceived as empty; a space to be traversed, mapped, bounded, contained, colonised. Antarctica was originally envisioned as ‘as a blank page, tabula rasa, white space on the map, or an empty screen for the projections of culture’.2 Against this empty screen the materiality of nature was marginalised either as a prop in the backstage of human achievement and endeavour, or that implacable and misunderstood force in need of being seized and dominated. If there is one historical trajectory running all the way down from the Greek terra incognita australis or the Ant-­arktos – the anti-­Arctic – to the emerging biotechnological imaginaries of now, it surely is one in which no recognition has ever been made that all sorts of nonhumans have been active in the tasks of keeping life going in the Antarctic. By the time of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–1958, the Antarctic was not only a white screen for projections of imperial feats, but had become a monitor, a curtain and a white board on which to scribble new governance arrangements. During the second half of the twentieth century, once the legal instruments and governance arrangements of the polar continent were put in place, the Antarctic swiftly turned into a unique and symbolically powerful laboratory for new forms of biological and geophysical research that opened up a window to planetary systems both past and future. Alongside these representations of the southern polar region as open for scientific colonisation, a discourse emerged strongly of Antarctica as a ‘last wilderness’ of sublime aesthetic value that ought to be appropriately protected and managed as a global commons for the future. By looking into the politics of representation and visualisation of Antarctica in the context of digital culture, this chapter invites, on the one hand, a shift toward thinking 125

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 125

21/12/2016 10:11

126  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica beyond the politics of representation of cultural purities to account for the materiality of the politics of life in Antarctica as an anthropogenic landscape. On the other hand, it calls for a critique of how representational practices in digital culture continue to enact formal geopolitical constructions of an Antarctica ‘out there’. There is no doubt that representations of the Antarctic have had significant discursive geopolitical effects in thinking and knowing the Antarctic and in writing Antarctica as global space. But when attempting to account for emerging forms of subjectivity and affectivity in Antarctica on a more ontological level, representational practices are not sufficient to describe the doings and feelings of being or living on the ice. As the field of critical geopolitics has shown,3 ­geopolitical knowledge is not only produced by the state, or the political and intellectual elites, but is also shaped and shared through popular culture and everyday practices. This form of popular geopolitics nevertheless emphasised textual deconstruction to the detriment of practices and performances that shape everyday experience of the geopolitical and include embodiment, emotions/affect and the entanglement with the non-­human.4 The chapter is loosely structured around four vignettes. In the first, Visualising Antarctica, I argue that computer models act as engines of inquiry within new ‘algorithmic architectures’, thus becoming central to the capture of experience,5 rather than merely as digital technologies of representation that index and reproduce empirical facts. Examining critically the dominance of scientific modelling in generating environmental narratives of Antarctica, I argue that such techniques of visualisation pervade visions of Antarctic futures, and enact a politics of anticipating nature through ‘an aesthetics of prediction’.6 Antarctica is repeatedly mobilised in the popular imagination as the driest, coldest, highest and most remote land on the planet, sitting at the bottom of the world. Hence, in the second vignette, Exhibiting Antarctica, I am interested in briefly accounting for how Antarctica travels north and is ‘brought home’ through immersive environments, ­exhibitions and public events. In other words, how Antarctica is framed across institutions such as museums and science centres, or events such as World Expos and Festivals, which act as cultural brokers in efforts to frame public understandings of Antarctica. Antarctica is regularly said to be the last continent to be exposed to human dwelling. In fact it has always been framed as the quintessentially off-­limits, out of bounds, extreme environment for human inhabitation. However, in the third vignette of the chapter, Inhabiting Antarctica, I discuss a range of Antarctic imaginaries of human habitation being mobilised in contemporary new media arts. As Glasberg has noted, ‘the status of humanity on Antarctic ice is at once highly assumed and under-­theorized’.7 Hence, in this third and last part, I look closely at how new media artists concerned with the politics of climate crisis are producing work that thrusts ‘representation and data beyond familiar, realist locations and beyond the mediated and disciplinary rationales of art and science’.8 Finally, I offer a brief discussion of how contemporary representational and visualisation politics of the Antarctic have become profoundly problematic, when notions of the social in an age of digital culture emphasise the fluid, assembled and multi-­layered nature of ‘societies’, and where the local and the global are irrevocably entangled and the boundaries of ‘the national’ inescapably porous. I conclude by suggesting that we need to expand discussions of how we may locate the making of meaning and signification in the ‘manifold of actions and interactions’9 that take place in the Antarctic, rather than restricting them to separate dimensions such as discourse, ideology or symbolic

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 126

21/12/2016 10:11

Mediating Antarctica in digital culture  127 order. Only then might we be able to bring a politics of representation concomitant with ­traditional signifiers of identity and difference, together with a post-­representational politics of the Antarctic, more attuned to the atmospheres, rhythms, flows, events and affective subjectivities of Antarctic life.

VISUALISING ANTARCTICA – ANTICIPATING NATURE Across the Antarctic and Southern Ocean regions an intricate system of different sensors continually generate data that is recorded, interpreted, applied and preserved over a long period and a scale spanning over 15 million square kilometres. Digital techniques of landscape visualisation are becoming ever more pervasive in presenting and conveying change to Antarctic landscapes and oceanscapes, examples of the ways through which our experience of space and place is digitally mediated. Digital mediation is a hallmark of the global digital culture that emerged in the 2000s and which has brought on a shifting set of values, practices and expectations regarding the way people act and interact within a contemporary networked society. Estimates indicate that by the time this book is published the increasingly rapid pace of digitalisation could very well be a ‘digital universe’ of more than 40 trillion gigabytes.10 In this context, there are repercussions for the way people engage with the Antarctic – and with each other about the Antarctic – in the context of an ever-­increasing computerisation and digitalisation of the social, from Facebook posts by tourists in Antarctica to glaciologists ­modelling the almost artful motions of glaciers and ice sheets. This points to the importance of examining critically how the contemporary scientific imagination of the Antarctic (and its futures) centred around practices of geo-­ visualisation are prime examples of multi-­modal frameworks that integrate differing modes of representation (visual, textual and numerical). Interpretive analysis of these representations allows both a teasing out of ‘what they reveal about social and material situations’11 as well as a novel politics of representation of the non-­human world in the Antarctic, whether we are visualising the movement of penguin colonies or the dynamics of climate patterns. In every case, as Kathryn Yusoff has argued, ‘the politics of visualizing Antarctica has affected the political forces of images to historically shape Antarctic politics’.12 It is not only the political force of Antarctic images that is being shaped, but also the social life of scientific models. I am referring specifically to the circulation of anticipatory scenarios produced by Antarctic scientists that rely on algorithmic modelling as devices for anticipating socio-­ecological futures of the Antarctic. Whether it is the ice-­sheet modelling used by glaciologists to trace the flows of ice and the movement of glaciers, in an attempt to understand glacial cycles and the evolution and future of ice-­stream dynamics, or climate and earth system modelling used by atmospheric scientists and climatologists to try and define the global reach of the Antarctic atmosphere and Southern Ocean, scientific visualisations may be framed as ‘media texts and navigational technologies of “earth writing,” debate, and decision-­making’.13 The problematic issue here is that computer-­generated representations can often be representations ‘pieced together from software whose particulars remain out of view of the user interface’.14 Antarctica, John Keane contends, is ‘a world-­leading laboratory in the

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 127

21/12/2016 10:11

128  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica arts of enfranchising nature. It brings to life, and puts into practice, new ways of imagining the political inclusion of the biosphere as a legitimate, potentially equal partner, within human affairs’.15 In this regard scientific visualisations in Antarctica become future-­ making practices oriented by the endeavour to detect, project – and hopefully manage – future changes in Antarctic ecosystems. Scientific visualisations rely on calculative modes of futuring that seek to establish facts about the past (Antarctica’s – and Earth’s past), not necessarily as a goal in itself, but rather with the explicit ambition of procuring knowledge for the future condition of the planet, and preparing for these future scenarios (through mitigation and remediation). In the specific case of climate models, Mike Hulme has demonstrated how these models are able to exert authority over policy decisions, over religious organisations, and over human imagination of the future. He argues that ‘there are two interrelated dimensions to the authority of climate models which need examination: the source of climate models’ epistemic authority and the source of their social authority’. On the one hand, climate models derive their epistemic authority by representing reality through abstractions and simplifications from mathematical expressions of physical laws. On the other hand, climate models gain social authority in the processes and interactions between scientific practices, cultural performances and political interests.16 This is what Hastrup and Skrydstrup call ‘the social life of climate change models’,17 where, as specific ­processes of modelling, climate futures visualisations become practices that lead to particular configurations of climate knowledge. And yet, while climate models remain significant abstractions and simplifications of reality, they possess an ‘affective quality’, as Yusoff argues, from the moment that ‘data become image, and thus regimes of colour, light, and density, the accumulative force of data become fluvial’.18 Yusoff has provided an insightful account of how the complex visual regimes that produced the Antarctic map can be traced to the specific modalities of global scientific visualisation, for instance as deployed by NASA. As she argues, ‘the politics of visualizing place that arise are intractable from the histories of the media in which they are embedded’.19 Much of Antarctic climate science relies on model-­based forecasting and predictions, which often become justifications for future-­oriented action. Computer modelling and simulation aggregate data to build scenarios of probable and possible future events. As integral practices of contemporary digital networked culture they allow scientific representations to gain and exercise a degree of authority that often shape strategic geopolitical narratives of the Antarctic. At the same time they can animate global environmentalist sentiments towards the Antarctic as the last wilderness in need of protection and care. The very production of Google Earth software, Lisa Parks argues, ‘is symptomatic of a global economy in which most nation-­states are unable to control the production and circulation of representations of their own territories’,20 where nothing seems out of reach or out of bounds for the globalising vision of satellites. Not even Antarctica, the last place on Earth, the surface of which is swarming with discrete points that can be digitally mapped, tracked, recorded, measured and simulated into big data. As Kathryn Yusoff once observed, ‘there is no historic topology that can adequately account for the geopolitics of the stream of visual data that makes a territory of Antarctica’.21 During the IGY the metanarrative was to observe geophysical phenomena and to secure data from all parts of the world. Antarctica became a key site for testing out new techniques and technologies of scientific measurement. It is important to note then

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 128

21/12/2016 10:11

Mediating Antarctica in digital culture  129 how the political history of Antarctica’s governance arrangement – the Antarctic Treaty System – coincides with the rise of ‘atmospheric politics’22 beginning with computerised weather forecasting in the mid-­1950s, satellite technology in the 1960s and climate modelling at a global scale since the 1970s. By the time ozone depletion was discovered over Antarctica, modelling had outpaced empirically based knowledge of the global climate, gained a foothold in energy and environmental policy, and climate scientists had managed to ‘establish simulation modelling as a legitimate source of policy-­relevant knowledge’. 23 During the 1980s the narrative of Antarctica as a key site in the negotiation of global environmental politics was also grounded in new data made available through new imagining technologies. Landmark among these was the discovery in 1984 of the ozone layer hole over Antarctica by scientists from the British Antarctic Survey. The epistemic value of science data visualisation of the ozone layer dramatically affected how environmental phenomena were perceived as a global environmental risk.24 The Antarctic continent is today dotted with webcams and remote sensing, photogrammetry, and GIS technologies. In many museums and science centres across many parts of the world one could take virtual tours to Antarctica through visualisation and simulation technologies. Google Earth was in effect my technology of choice to “travel” to the Antarctic Peninsula in 2011 just prior to physically travelling there in the summer of 2012 to conduct research. Google Earth became that ‘digital peep-­box’,25 allowing mash-­ups of Antarctica by weaving data from different sources to generate visualisations of the features of the Fildes Peninsula (King George Island, South Shetlands and the Antarctic Peninsula). I was able to get a ‘street view’ of where I would be staying that made me think about the points of views embedded in the layers of information, where the software shows some of its inherited imperial practices of mapmaking. As Helmreich reminds us, ‘Google Earth depends on representations that come from institutional addresses’.26 The world-­making capacities of models is yet another reason why making the political implications of representation in science more explicit is crucial. This entails an examination of the means by which scientific representations are produced, made intelligible and put into circulation across diverse communities of practice. It is clear that in the context of Antarctica, a wide range of social actors use and engage with scientific representations and visualisations to foster their agendas in the region, including conservationists and environmental activists. But we must remember that representational practices in Antarctic science are not detached from historical, political and cultural influences, or the modes of human engagement with and behaviour in the continent and surrounding ocean, which ultimately speak back to these scientific representations.

EXHIBITING ANTARCTICA – BRINGING ANTARCTICA HOME THROUGH IMMERSIVE ENVIRONMENTS Antarctica figures prominently in museums and science centres around the world, whether as permanent exhibitions within well-­ established institutions or as one-­ off special exhibitions. Yet there is no substantial work to date that has explored critically the representational politics of public exhibitions of Antarctica, particularly in such events as World’s Fair, Expositions and Biennales. The Antarctic has also been ‘captured’ and exhibited in such forums, which as Winter has observed, are public events reaching

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 129

21/12/2016 10:11

130  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica huge audiences, reflecting the aims and anxieties, beliefs and values of their time.27 A relatively recent example worth mentioning was during the 1992 Seville World Expo. The Chilean Pavilion organisers decided to ship a one-­hundred-­ton iceberg across the Atlantic (a process that took twenty-­eight days), removed from the ‘bowels of Chilean Antarctica’ as one commentator put it, and preserved in the broiling Spanish summer through an intricate refrigeration system. The iceberg became the central exhibit of the Chilean Pavilion, a twenty-­eight-­foot-­tall installation composed of several smaller pieces of ice.28 The newly elected democratic government of Chile used the pavilion as an opportunity to shine in the international spotlight after eighteen years of military dictatorship, determined to articulate a radical break from the years of military regime through a strong performance of identity. One of the chosen symbols of this ‘new Chile’ was Antarctica. Chilean environmentalists and cultural writers quickly jumped in to criticise and deconstruct the event as an empty spectacle of market capitalism. But this embodied representation of a ‘Chilean Antarctic’ was anything but void. The representational politics at play during this event are important because – as an exercise of place branding and public diplomacy – they point to a clear statement of sovereignty claims to a Chilean Antarctic Territory. The geopolitics of polar sovereignty is thus embodied in a ‘captured’ iceberg. Almost two decades later, the 2010 Shanghai World Expo attracted 246 countries and international organisations, 80 urban best practice case studies, and 18 corporate pavilions for what was arguably the largest Expo in the history of the Bureau International des Expositions, with an estimated 73 million visitors (94 per cent of them Chinese).29 Amid the cornucopia of this trade convention meets theme park, and in response to an invitation to join the EU–Belgian pavilion, the International Polar Foundation created a giant LED-­lit ice cube to draw visitors into the world of the Polar Regions, polar science and climate change, as a showcase for Belgium’s involvement in climate-­related sciences.30 As I walked through several pavilions during a steamy and crowded evening in Shanghai, I noticed that several were showcasing Antarctica. In the Australian pavilion for instance, a cartoon of Douglas Mawson hinted at the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–14 and instructed visitors that Mawson’s work – and the Australian activity that has followed since – was an important contribution from Australia to the world. This has become more important since the days of the Shanghai Expo in late 2010 as the Australian and Tasmanian regional governments have ramped up their Antarctic credentials to attract Chinese investment and tourism to Hobart, which is becoming ­positioned as Australia’s Antarctic hub.31 At the Chilean pavilion, an interactive touch-­screen displayed a map of the country. Visitors, mainly Chinese, were engaging with the digital visual display through simple and multi-­touch gestures. These would open video vignettes showing the lives of ordinary citizens in everyday situations, including in the Antarctic Peninsula. As is common in spatial representations and maps in Chile, including television weather reports and school history and geography textbooks, the Chilean Antarctic territorial claim was part of the digital display. But perhaps the most important exhibition was the Ice Cube in the EU–Belgian pavilion, which after the closing of the Shanghai Expo in October 2010 was mounted again for a period of five months in Brussels in early 2013. One of the interesting features of this exhibition was that it invited visitors to see if they ‘were up to the challenge of living in Antarctica’, by visiting the Inside the Station exhibition, which took visitors on

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 130

21/12/2016 10:11

Mediating Antarctica in digital culture  131 an interactive journey inside Princess Elisabeth Station, to experience everyday life and learn about polar science in Antarctica. In this case, the immersive environment enacts a border-­crossing environment,32 embodying and mediating knowledge of the Antarctic in specific ways that enable visitors to supposedly become active participants rather than passive observers, and where the focus shifts from presenting facts about Antarctica to reconstituting and recreating an experience of being there. In other words, the exhibit not only attempts new sensory modalities to make the abstract experiential, but it also affords a world-­making affective relationship to the Antarctic, where the continent seems to be removed and ‘brought home’ from its remote location around the geographic South Pole. In this reverse process of an Antarctica travelling north, what always seems to be rendered invisible are the contested and shifting geopolitical dynamics of the Antarctic region. Here the element of geopolitical contestation is obscured through a reframing of Antarctica from a space of contest between nation states to a space for combat between humans and a harsh environment ‘out there’. Another more recent case was Antarctopia,33 the Antarctic pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale of Architecture, which brought together architects and artists to design and represent present and future models of living in Antarctica by entertaining visions that transcend the modern research station. For Nadim Samman, curator of the Antarctic Pavilion, the exhibition acts as a ‘virtual research station’ that may allow for a broader critique of how the continent is conceived and managed by its governing bodies in ways that may influence a diversity of ‘southern polar agendas’ within an expanded transnational Antarctic imaginary.34 Purposely situated as a transnational pavilion against the Biennale’s overly determined nation state structure, the Antarctic pavilion aimed, in view of its conceptual designer, to capture a politics of representation of a transnational space that becomes a mode of questioning and challenging the politics of territorial representation in Antarctica.35

INHABITING ANTARCTICA – ANTICIPATING CULTURE The poles are places that are part fantasy and part reality, Jane Marsching and Andrea Polli argue.36 In a similar vein, this ‘symbolic lure of the unknown south’ shapes the ‘ways that Antarctica as geographic terminus has been made to stand for hope or for doom – and usually both at the same time’.37 In literary fiction on Antarctica, as the extensive work of Elizabeth Leane has shown,38 the Antarctic continent has always been inhabited in previous historical times (lost or alien civilisations, indigenous peoples, supernatural beings), or in alternative or parallel historical times (Nazis, for example). Yet archaeological research39 has shown that the first human inhabitants were whalers and sealers who originally settled in Antarctic and sub-­Antarctic islands during the early nineteenth century, often for relatively extended periods of time (though never permanently). In this section I am interested in providing a brief account of how new media art and art/science collaborations represent a process I am calling the terraforming of Antarctica.40 The term emerged in science fiction literature in the 1940s and then was adopted in the astronomical sciences by the 1970s to refer to the transformation of other planets atmospheres and geologies into habitable environments for humans and other species. The examples of new media art practices in Antarctica are all in one way or

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 131

21/12/2016 10:11

132  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica another an attempt at presenting a different ontology, one which would assign primacy – as Tim Ingold would argue – ‘to processes of formation as against their final products, and to flows and transformations of materials as against states of matter’.41 I use the notion of terraforming as a trope for examining the worlding processes of making Antarctica familiar and to provide a tentative anthropological account of the ways in which worlds in extreme environments are made and unmade. Taking advantage of its conjectural elasticity, terraforming is a notion to think the anthropologically through the anthropocene. It provides a novel platform from which to engage with the ‘extreme’, a concept that ‘has become a signifier securely attached to the problem of what humans, human practices, and human environments have become and are becoming, while simultaneously pointing to that which is to come’.42 In a similar way to how Valentine et al. mobilise the notion of extreme, I think terraforming correspondingly refers to ‘acts of extending the world, where that extension represents the inclusion of what is known and un-­known, what can be felt as well as intuited, quantified as well as imagined’.43 To discuss new media arts practices in the Antarctic it is imperative to consider the problematic that Fox presents when contending that there is a strong bias in place to limit the kind of artistic forms that can be practiced there. Fox rightly notes how the underlying imperatives of national Antarctic programmes, and science foundations have played key roles in restricting Antarctica to those artists ‘whose work is pictorial, representational and conventional’ and whose artistic practices help ‘document the physical form and conditions of the continent, and then make it comprehensible as a sublime landscape suitable for preservation as a stage for scientific inquiry’.44 Therefore in this third vignette I attempt to trace the work of creative practitioners who are developing not just gallery-­ based representations of Antarctica, but instead are proposing alternative modes of ‘making Antarctica familiar’,45 of imagining human inhabitation of the Antarctic. I am interested here in the ‘world-­making’ role of these digital arts practices, particularly in the ways in which they provide ways of knowing Antarctica, which are also means of acting on/in it. I explore how new digital arts, speculative design and information aesthetics, being more concerned with material embodiment, deploy a range of scenarios of human dwelling that differ to the literary fictions of the twentieth century and speak of a mode of terraforming the Antarctic where the mode of colonisation of the Antarctic serves both as harbinger of future conditions of life on Earth and as a proxy for planetary space exploration. At present, human presence in Antarctic environments is limited in numbers but also highly regulated and controlled in terms of the activities that may be performed. Each year roughly 30,000 tourists and 10,000 scientists and logistic support personnel visit the Antarctic, of which roughly 1,000 live there year-­round. As Bureaud observes, Antarctica today ‘is much more than just the sign of appropriation via symbolic marking or the playground of heroic expeditionary figures’.46 However, the endless imaginary of the sublime and untouched Antarctic wilderness overpowers the fact that new forms of life are emerging there alongside life-­forms that have been there for millennia. These new forms of life in Antarctica, Griffiths observes, are subjected ‘to a bracing and disjunctive seasonal rhythm. The human generations are annual. It is a peculiar civilisation where the workings of history might be laid bare’.47 This consciousness of a peculiar community on the Ice that Tom Griffiths speaks about – akin perhaps to the sense given by Ernst Bloch in his Spirit of Utopia – is also captured

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 132

21/12/2016 10:11

Mediating Antarctica in digital culture  133 in recent artistic work in Antarctica. One example is Lucy + Jorge Orta’s Antarctica’s World Passport project, which was first presented at the XLVI Venice Biennale of Art in 1995.48 In 2007 they mounted their ephemeral installation Antarctic Village – No Borders near the Argentine Marambio station in the Antarctic Peninsula, including the raising of an Antarctic Flag, staging a performance of flagging up an aspirational (polar) transnationalism that is recurrent in contemporary art practice, for instance in the audiovisual work of DJ Spooky (Paul Miller). In the case of Lucy + Jorge Orta, the flag, named by the artists the Métisse Flag, in reference to the French notion of métissage culturel, attempts to set up Antarctica as a space devoid of national boundaries and open to the mixing of cultures.49 In Lucy + Jorge Orta’s work Antarctica becomes an emblem of globalisation from below, a political art intervention in the Antarctic landscape. Nevertheless, some of the conventional stereotypes of Antarctica are still reinforced in this body of work. The fifty or so Dome Dwellings that make up that Antarctic village of no borders are in fact not habitable. In all their lively materiality of colour and texture, their thingness is reduced to a symbol; or as ‘emblems of habitation’ where ‘everyone has the right to move freely and circulate beyond the state borders to a territory of their choice’50 as the words stencilled in the domes say. Yet these emblems of habitation house no inhabitants. An important part of my research in Antarctica has been to understand how humans are learning to live on the Ice,51 looking at social practices of inhabiting the extreme, the cultural dynamics among international bases and concomitant processes of making Antarctica familiar, where living in Antarctica becomes a mode of terraforming (transforming Antarctica into a habitable world), and also as a stepping stone into modes of thinking about life on other planets. Thinking about life in Antarctica implicates a shift to thinking about ‘how worlds may be arrayed and organised with humans, but not only humans’.52 As I have argued elsewhere,53 the area where I have been undertaking research since 2011 for example – the Fildes Peninsula, South Shetlands Islands and the Antarctic Peninsula – can be described as a juxtaposition or meshwork of lively geographies: a territorial geography of networked national field stations; a non-­human geography of bio-­geophysical things, entities, processes, life-­forms, events and phenomena; a material geography of international logistical cooperation; labour geographies of daily scientific practices and logistic personnel involved in field science support; and the leisure ­geographies of international tourists.

REMIXING ANTARCTICA As a key concept and practice within digital culture, remix stands for those connectivities that unfold within the recombinant possibilities of contemporary digital technologies. For Whelan and Freund, remix involves the ‘distributed reassembly, reconfiguration and circulation of pre-­existing cultural and material elements’.54 What art can bring to science (importantly but not only in the form of representational capacities) and what science enables (in the form of data or instrumentation)55 is an important element at stake when thinking about the possibilities afforded to artists and scientists by networked data environments. One interesting example is the experimental project INSTRUMENT: One Antarctic Night, a performative and reconfigurable remix installation that uses a proprietary DataRemix Engine to invite participants to create, perform and share aesthetic

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 133

21/12/2016 10:11

134  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica multi-­modal remixes of astrophysics data using data-­driven visualisation and sonification strategies.56 The interactive artwork was created using 287,800 images of the universe captured by the CSTAR robotic telescope located in Dome A on the Antarctic Plateau. The aim of the developers of the work was to create, perform and share aesthetic multi-­ modal remixes of astrophysics data for participants to interact with the touch-­sensitive remix stations in the gallery, or to use internet-­enabled devices to remix in ‘noise’ that has been removed by the scientific process and ‘scratch’ their own personal versions of the universe. In doing so, the artists aimed to demonstrate that data is no longer constrained to scientific or analytical domains, but has emerged as a cultural raw material with myriad expressive potentials. Once again, I affirm that the issue is not the representation of an Antarctica ‘out there’ that becomes meaningful and valuable once it is represented and named. Rather, Antarctica becomes an algorithm in big data information ecologies of networked knowledge and practice where new forms of collaboration between art and sciences are enabled. Tom Corby also argues for a redeployment of the technologies and data of climate change beyond their normative cognitive and analytical functions, claiming that climate data has ‘an affective dimension that can produce representations of environmental complexity as an expression of the systems, feedback mechanisms, and the modulations of ecological interaction operative in the environment’.57 In discussing a series of projects including the Southern Ocean Studies Project that used environmental variables around Antarctica derived from the OCCAM data set, and drawing on Felix Guattari’s arguments for transversal aesthetic practices,58 Corby persuasively shows how the use of scientific data by artists ‘can innovate forms of practice that direct the imaging potential of science into aesthetic domains and in so doing, contribute hybrid, interdisciplinary approaches’.59 What these types of collaborations bring to life is that in Antarctica ‘many different things gather, not just deliberative humans but a diverse range of actors and forces, some of which we know about, some not, and some of which may be just on the edge of ­awareness’.60 Antarctica is not a ready-­made reality given meaning and value through our signs and texts. It becomes recombinant data open to be remixed where specific sociocultural and techno-­aesthetic grammar are implied. What is at stake is how Antarctica is already extensively – and intensely – incorporated into ‘algorithmic architectures’ that ‘scrape, mine, harvest, store, cluster, sequence, combine and analyse data generated through our daily use of computational systems’.61 Whether it is tourists sharing images on social media, artists finding new ways of making our ecological crises comprehensible, or scientists anticipating the probable and possible courses of the natural world, Antarctica is not only an object of representation anymore; it is subject to appropriation, sampling and mash-­up. Similarly to the scientific visualisations discussed earlier in this chapter, a similar question can be posed to data visualisations in digital art. That is, what kinds of politics emerge from the formations and architectures of big data at the ­conjunction of aesthetic and algorithmic cultures.62 The idea of remixing Antarctica was also in the mind of Paul Miller (who performs under the name DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid), who travelled to Antarctica in 2008 to capture the resonant frequencies of ice for his work Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica (2009).63 What first started as a film about the sound of ice, which involved taking a recording studio to the Antarctic, became, in the words of Susan Ballard, ‘an act of translation’ where Miller developed a process of musical remix.64 In critiquing Miller’s mapping

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 134

21/12/2016 10:11

Mediating Antarctica in digital culture  135 and remapping of Antarctica as a terra nullius, Ballard shows how the work, while innovative in many ways, only reinforces existing Euro-­American models of nature. In addition to Sinfonia Antarctica, Miller’s projects included a series of posters depicting a People’s Republic of Antarctica as well as Prints for a Hypothetical Revolution in Antarctica (2009) which, again following principles of remix in digital culture, become a reinterpretation of pre-­existing images and signs, in a perpetual motion of combination and recombination. However, as Ballard rightly observes, they ultimately only manage to ‘capture and re-­enact an early model of conservation: where the passive environment is cared for and remapped according to what we think is best for it’.65

REPRESENTATIONAL POLITICS OF THE ANTARCTIC IN AN AGE OF DIGITAL CULTURE Notwithstanding the effective authority of representations of the southern polar region as an exceptional continent kept aside for science, international collaboration, and environmental conservation, human engagements with and in the Antarctic have always been tempered by the logics of transnational capital and national interests. As we approach the generally accepted bicentenary of Antarctica’s discovery, the region continues to be the subject of geopolitical controversy, both symbolically and materially. At a time of increasing climate change, and when the regimes governing Antarctica are becoming a matter of ‘ever-­intensifying political manoeuvring’,66 it is possible to observe how investment in science is paired with deployments of Antarctic infrastructure and logistics as a mode of signalling presence and influence in Antarctic decision-­making within present and future geopolitical scenarios. On-­going imaginaries of a global commons, the last wilderness, the sublime Ice, all dovetail with rising interests in Antarctic resources. At the beginning of the twenty-­first century new biotechnological imaginaries of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean have burst onto the stage, producing the southern polar region as a new pharmacopia – a cornucopia of biological resources ready for discovery and patenting. These imaginaries of bio-­capital have ensured that representations of the Antarctic continent as the last pristine continent on Earth are misleading. In fact these new representational strategies brought forward by transnational capital mean that the southern polar continent and ocean have become a new ‘frontier’ to explore, not for the sake of ‘pure’ ecological knowledge, but rather for more immediate concerns of ­harnessing biological diversity as a resource. While presenting Antarctica as a sublime and pristine wilderness establishes an emotional loyalty to the continent that serves the cause of science,67 Antarctica is in a continuous process of becoming. This process can be best captured by what Christopher Groves calls the ‘compulsive dance between the need to foreclose future options and the impulse to open up new horizons of possibility’.68 When we think of the representational politics of Antarctic futures – whether in science or art – we observe, on the one hand, a future constructed as radical uncertainty and possibly disruptive, while, on the other hand, there is a future constructed as tameable through the calculation of risk. What about new horizons of possibility for the future of the Antarctic region? Or as Anna Tsing asks, the ‘possibilities for imagining the about-­to-­be-­present’ in ways that avoid the ‘shadow of inevitability’ of neoliberal globalisation and which pay attention ‘to states of

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 135

21/12/2016 10:11

136  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica emergence – and emergency . . . [where] hope and despair huddle together’.69 What is at stake here then is not an ultimate and transcendental Antarctic reality to which homage is paid – or which is preserved for posterity – but rather a complex interplay of many possible worlds that are produced through the interaction of human and non-­human agencies. Environmental historian Tom Griffiths once noted that Antarctica is not only a region of elemental majesty; it is also a global archive, a window on outer space and a scientific laboratory. It is not only a wondrous world of ice; it is also a political frontier, a social microcosm and a humbling human experiment.70

Griffiths’ vision of Antarctica as that ‘giant, breathing organism clamped to the base of the globe’71 captures in some way the framing that this chapter aims to offer, as a brief critical account of the complex ways in which Antarctica continues to be constructed discursively and materially in an age of digital culture. In the context of an expanding global digital culture, practices that make Antarctica legible often yield discursive and material products, in the form of models, reports, stories, images, sounds and embodied experiences. Digital culture has opened up important debates around the affordances brought by new technologies, as well as a renewed focus on research methods, opportunities for collaborative scholarship and open-­source peer review, as well as innovative ways of sharing knowledge. In this regard the commodification of Antarctica has intensified in an age of ubiquitous computing, at the same time as digital media – both in art and science – afford new ways of interactivity and liveness in networked environments, novel modes of interoperability and distinct interfaces for interaction and immersion. The attempts by a range of digital media artists to move beyond the view of Antarctica as a mere repository of representations does not mean obliviousness to the importance of understanding the politics of representation of Antarctica. The significance of representations of the Antarctic as social acts grounded in specific historical and geographical conditions is critical for understanding the making and unmaking of the Antarctic. Representations can often turn out to be static and lifeless abstractions, but they can also be productive practices in the cultural construction of meanings. Problems arise when Antarctica is reduced to a series of trouble-­free representations that are removed and disconnected from the material dimensions of Antarctic life. These include bodily experiences in Antarctica as a place of human inhabitation and work, but also how these human lives are bound up in processes of production with the lives of animals, plants, microorganisms, weather, ice, and ocean. To a certain extent the historical and literary imaginaries of the Antarctic today find themselves contested by the embodied social experience of the southern polar landscape. Nevertheless, when scientists, tourists and an increasingly varied range of actors and visitors rush to (data)mine the Antarctic landscape as a repository of meaning, what they bring back are representations that expand the already rich Antarctic imaginary, but that are problematic for their normative presumptions. This is the case when particular representative objects of the Antarctic – endowed with particular intended meanings and values, and overarched by specific epistemic positions – shape both the subject and the interpreter within culturally bounded settings.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 136

21/12/2016 10:11

Mediating Antarctica in digital culture  137

CONCLUSIONS I started this chapter with a reference to Elena Glasberg, and I will conclude by doing the same. Antarctica, she argues, is the last place on earth but also ‘the first place for the technological development of new representational practices, new modes of exploratory knowledge, and new ways of tying the unusable (or wasted) earth to the engines of capital accumulation that have propelled us into transnational global exchange’.72 This is an enticing provocation because despite its perceived remoteness as that which lies at the bottom of the world, Antarctica is located right at the centre of digital culture. The poles have only been rediscovered in this era of climate crises, they are being reinvented in this age of reuse and remixes. Antarctica can be cut and pasted across contexts that until recently would have been unimaginable. The production and circulation of future scenarios created from computer modelling is akin to those Antarctic futures made ­possible – or preferable – by works such as DJ Spooky’s Sinfonia Antarctica or Lucy + Jorge Orta’s Antarctica’s World Passport. The future, or futures, of the Antarctic region are continually being prefigured, anticipated and contested – a reflection of Antarctica’s emergence as a global matter of concern. Antarctica is an intrinsically future-­oriented problem that shapes our capacities and techniques to exercise foresight. The intersection of interests between sciences and new media arts in Antarctica is important to the production and circulation of anticipated scenarios, built upon a knowledge that is captured in concrete locations: in ice cores, atmospheric compositions, geological traces, place names, memories, bodily sensations, stories, simulations, diagrams or other media that may close the gap between past experience and future expectation by incorporating them into a comprehensive model. When envisioning the future of the impact of humans on the environment, art and science can thus come together in innovative ways that transcend the pervasive Cartesian divide, impelling our engagements with the Antarctic into possibilities afforded by non-­ representational or more than representational approaches. While I have deliberately chosen four vignettes that focus on how digital culture and media afford ways of anticipating nature and anticipating culture in Antarctica, my broader concern remains with moving past representational theories of knowledge production the walls of which are set up by the dichotomies between subject and object, between the individual and the social, and between object and image. Digital networked media – in the context of expanding digital cultures – affords the creation of a range of Antarctic imaginaries where the region and the continent are presented (and represented) as a globalised and, at times, denationalised space, putting in place a particular anticipatory logic from where particular Antarctic futures are assembled, mobilised, and put into practice. This most certainly occurs simultaneously to the ways in which national interests from state and non-­state actors shape public perceptions of the sovereignty problem. A critical examination of the politics of representation and visualisation of Antarctica in the context of digital culture must open up for more debate that which accounts for the materiality of politics of life in Antarctica – as some of the works briefly mentioned in this chapter do. I have also hinted at a call for a critique of how representational practices in digital culture continue to enact geopolitical formations in the Southern Ocean region. Representations and visualisations of the Antarctic continue to have discursive geopolitical effects in thinking and knowing the Antarctic. Yet we must also account for how

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 137

21/12/2016 10:11

138  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica representational practices often fail to account for the doings and feelings of emerging forms of subjectivity and affectivity in Antarctica on a more ontological level. More conversations are needed to contemplate how we may move beyond a textual ­analysis of Antarctic images to explore shifts and continuities in the cultural u ­ nderstandings of the Antarctic afforded by digital and networked technologies in science and art. The underlying aim is to be able to recognise how Antarctica provides a trope to challenge dominant modes of representational thinking, particularly of national, legal and scientific regimes, while conceiving life in off-­limit environments and accounting for the vibrancy of human and non-­human entanglements.

NOTES   1.   2.   3.   4.   5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Glasberg 2012, xix. Glasberg 2012, xxvi. Toal 1996. Dittmer and Gray 2010. Rossiter and Soehle 2015, 214. Rossiter and Soehle 2015, 215. Glasberg 2012, xxii. Bloom and Glasberg 2012, 138. Anderson and Harrison 2010, 5. Craglia et al. 2012. Elwood 2010, 403. Yusoff 2005, 382. Walker 2015, 65. Helmreich 2011, 1219. Keane 2014. Hulme 2013, 31. Hastrup 2013. Yusoff 2009, 1021. Yusoff 2005, 385. Parks 2010, 260. Yusoff 2006, 394. Edwards 2010. Edwards 2010, 358. Grevsmühl 2014. Kingsbury and Jones 2009, 502. Helmreich 2011, 1229. Winter 2012. Korowin 2010. Winter 2012. See http://www.polarfoundation.org/projects/detail/shanghai_world_expo_2010_the_ice_cube. Leane et al. 2016. Mortensen 2010, 323. http://www.antarcticpavilion.com/antarctopia-­concept.html. Samman 2014. See also Keane 2014. Marsching and Polli 2012. Glasberg 2011. Leane 2012. Zarankin and Xenatore 2005. Salazar 2015. Ingold 2012, 210. Valentine et al. 2012, 1009. Valentine et al. 2012, 1011.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 138

21/12/2016 10:11

Mediating Antarctica in digital culture  139 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

Fox, 2012, 30. Bureaud 2012. Bureaud 2012, 193. Griffiths 2008, 4. See http://www.antarcticaworldpassport.com/en/project. For more information see Pietromarchi 2008. Hoos and Gregg 2011. In this context ice is capitalised to indicate the way many people refer to Antarctica as ‘the Ice’. Anderson and Harrison 2010, 17. Salazar 2013. Whelan and Freund 2014. Gabrys and Yusoff 2012, 16. West et al. 2013. For more information see http://www.xrezlab.com/instrument-­one-­antarctic-­night/. Corby 2012. Guattari 2008. Corby 2012, 249. Anderson and Harrison 2010, 37. Rossiter and Zehle 2015, 221. Martin 2015; Rossiter and Zehle 2015. See http://www.djspooky.com/art/terra_nova.php. Ballard 2012, 169. Ballard 2012, 174. Bravo 2009. Fox 2012, 30. Groves 2014, xx. Tsing 2005, 269. Griffiths 2008, 4. Griffiths 2008, 5. Glasberg 2012, 34.

REFERENCES Anderson, B. and P. Harrison. 2010. Taking-­place: Non-­representational Theories and Geography. Farnham: Ashgate. Ballard S. 2012. Nonorganic life: Frequency, virtuality and the sublime in Antarctica. Pages 165–86 in Marsching, Jane D. and Andrea Polli (eds), Far Field: Digital Culture, Climate Change, and the Poles. Bristol: Intellect. Bloom, L.E. and E. Glasberg. 2012. Disappearing ice and missing data: Climate change in the visual culture of the polar regions. Pages 117–41 in Marsching, J.D. and Polli, A. (eds), Far Field: Digital Culture, Climate Change, and the Poles. Bristol: Intellect. Bravo, M. 2009. Preface: Legacies of polar science. In Shadian, J. and Tennberg, M. (eds), Legacies and Change in Polar Sciences: Historical, Legal and Political Reflections on the International Polar Year. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bureaud, A. 2012. Inhabiting the extreme or making Antarctica familiar. Pages 187–97 in Marsching, J.D. and Polli, A. (eds), Far Field: Digital Culture, Climate Change, and the Poles. Bristol: Intellect. Corby, T. 2012. Systemness: Towards a data aesthetics of climate change. Pages 237–50 in Marsching, J.D. and Polli, A. (eds), Far Field: Digital Culture, Climate Change, and the Poles. Bristol: Intellect. Craglia, M., de Bie, K., Jackson, D., Pesaresi, M., Remetey-­Fülöpp, G., Wang, C., Annoni, A., Bian, L., Campbell, F., Ehlers, M., van Genderen, J., Goodchild, M., Guo, H., Lewis, A., Simpson, R., Skidmore, A. and Woodgate, P. 2012. Digital Earth 2020: Towards the vision for the next decade. International Journal of Digital Earth 5(1): 4–21. Dittmer, J., and Gray, N. 2010. Popular geopolitics 2.0: Towards new methodologies of the everyday. Geography Compass 4(11): 1664–77. Edwards, P.N. 2010. A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. MIT Press. Elwood, S. 2010. Geographic information science: Visualization, visual methods, and the geoweb. Progress in Human Geography 35(3): 401–8. Fox, W.L. 2012. Every new thing: The evolution of artistic technologies in the Antarctic – or how land arts came

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 139

21/12/2016 10:11

140  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica to the ice. Pages 19–39 in Marsching, J.D. and Polli, A. (eds), Far Field: Digital Culture, Climate Change, and the Poles. Bristol: Intellect. Gabrys, J., and Yusoff, K. 2012. Arts, sciences and climate change: Practices and politics at the threshold. Science As Culture 21(1): 1–24. Glasberg, E. 2011. ‘Living ice’: Rediscovery of the poles in an era of climate crisis. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 39(3/4): 221–46. Glasberg, E. 2012. Antarctica as Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change. Palgrave Macmillan. Grevsmühl, S. 2014. The creation of global imaginaries: The Antarctic Ozone Hole and the Isoline Tradition in the Atmospheric Sciences. Pages 29–53 in Schneider, B. and Nocke, T. (eds), Image Politics of Climate Change: Visualizations, Imaginations, Documentations. Verlag. Griffiths, T. 2008. The cultural challenge of Antarctica: The 2007 Stephen-­Murray Smith memorial lecture. The La Trobe Journal 82: 4–14. Groves, C. 2014. Taming the future or surfing uncertainty? Science As Culture 23(2): 283–8. Guattari, F. 2005. The Three Ecologies. London: Bloomsbury. Hastrup K. 2013. Anticipating nature: the productive uncertainty of climate models. Pages 1–29 in Hastrup, K. and Skrydstrup, M. (eds). The Social Life of Climate Change Models: Anticipating Nature. New York and London: Routledge. Helmreich, S. 2011. From spaceship earth to Google ocean: Planetary icons, indexes, and infrastructures. Social Research 78(4): 1211–42. Hoos Fox, J. and Duggan, G. 2011. Subject = object: Antarctic village – no borders. Pages 101–7 in Lucy + Jorge Orta – Food-­Water-­Life. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Hulme, M. 2013. How climate models gain and exercise authority. Pages 30–44 in Hastrup, K. and Skrydstrup, M. (eds), The Social Life of Climate Change Models: Anticipating Nature. New York and London: Routledge. Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge. Keane, J. 2014 (June 24). Antarctica: Notes on the fate of sovereignty. The Conversation. Available online at https://theconversation.com/antarctica-­notes-­on-­the-­fate-­of-­sovereignty. Kingsbury, P. and Jones, J.P. 2009. Walter Benjamin’s Dionysian adventures on Google earth. Geoforum 40(4): 502–13. Korowin, E. 2010. ‘Iceberg! Right ahead!’(Re) discovering Chile at the 1992 Universal Exposition in Seville, Spain. Studies in Latin American Popular Culture (28): 48–63. Leane, E. 2012. Antarctica in Fiction: Imaginative Narratives of the Far South. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leane, E., Winter, T. and Salazar, J.F. 2016. Caught between nationalism and internationalism: Replicating histories of Antarctica in Hobart. International Journal of Heritage Studies 22(1), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/135 27258.2015.1114010. Marsching, J.D. and Polli, A. (eds) 2012. Far Field: Digital Culture, Climate Change, and the Poles. Bristol: Intellect. Martin, R. (ed.) 2015. The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics. London: Routledge. Mortensen, M.F. 2010. Designing immersion exhibits as border-­crossing environments. Museum Management and Curatorship 25(3): 323–36. Parks, L. 2010. Between orbit and the ground: Conflict monitoring, Google Earth and the ‘Crisis in Darfur’ Project. Pages 245–67 in Sarkar, B. and Walker, J. (eds), Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering. London and New York: Routledge. Pietromarchi, B. (ed.). 2008. Antarctica. Milan: Mondadori Electa. Rossiter N. and Zehle, S. 2015. The aesthetics of algorithmic experience. Pages 214–21 in Martin, R. (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics. New York: Routledge. Salazar, J.F. 2013. Geographies of place-­making in Antarctica: An ethnographic approach. The Polar Journal 3(1): 53–71. Salazar, J.F. 2015. Terraforming Antarctica. Paper presented at 114th American Anthropological Association Annual Conference. Denver, Colorado, 19 November. Samman, N. 2014. Other Antarctica, http://www.antarcticpavilion.com/antarctopia-­essays.html. Accessed 31 January 2016. Toal, G. 1996. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tsing, A.L. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Valentine, D., Olson, V.A., and Battaglia, D. 2012. Extreme: Limits and horizons in the once and future cosmos. Anthropological Quarterly, 85(4): 1007–26. Walker, J. 2015. Projecting sea level rise: Documentary film and other geolocative technologies. Pages 61–85 in Juhasz, A. and Lebow, A. (eds), A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 140

21/12/2016 10:11

Mediating Antarctica in digital culture  141 West, R., Malina, R., Lewis, J., Gresham-­Lancaster, S., Borsani, A., Merlo, B. and Wang, L. 2013. Dataremix: Designing the data made through artscience collaboration. Proceedings of the IEEE VIS Arts Program (VISA). Available on http://visap.uic.edu/2013/papers/West_DataRemix.pdf. Last accessed 25 January 2015. Whelan, A. and Freund, K. 2013. Remix: Practice, context, culture. M/C Journal 16(4). Accessed 15 January 2015,http://journal.media-­culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/694. Winter, T. 2012. Shanghai Expo: An International Forum on the Future of Cities. London: Routledge. Yusoff, K. 2005. Visualizing Antarctica as a place in time. Space and Culture 8(4): 381–98. Yusoff, K. 2009. Excess, catastrophe, and climate change. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27: 1010–29. Zarankin, A., and Senatore, M.X. 2005. Archaeology in Antarctica: Nineteenth-­century capitalism expansion strategies. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 9(1): 43–56.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 141

21/12/2016 10:11

9.  Common interest and common heritage in Antarctica Rüdiger Wolfrum

INTRODUCTION Inspired by the Declaration that the deep seabed and the ocean floor constitute the common heritage of mankind1 and that their utilization has to benefit mankind as a whole, some attempts have been made to establish a system for Antarctica similar to the one for the deep seabed and ocean floor under Part XI of the UN Convention for the Law of the Sea (Convention).2 In reaction to the negotiations concerning the management and development of Antarctic mineral resources, developing countries in particular articulated their interest in participating in the deliberations as well as in the economic activities concerned. To articulate their views they used the UN General Assembly as a platform. They argued that a mineral regime for Antarctica should be negotiated with the full participation of all members of the international community, preferably under UN General Assembly guidance.3 Upon their initiative the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting (ATCM) was requested by the UN General Assembly in 1986 and in the following years to ‘impose a moratorium on the negotiations to establish a mineral regime until such time all members of the international community can participate fully in such negotiations’.4 The views of the UN General Assembly were clearly set out in A/RES/44/124 [B] on 15 December 1989. The relevant paragraphs read: 4. Expresses the conviction that, in the view of the significant impact that Antarctica exerts on the global environment and ecosystems, any régime to be established for the protection and conservation of the Antarctic environment and its dependent and associated ecosystems, in order to be for the benefit of mankind as a whole and in order to gain universal acceptability necessary to ensure full compliance and enforcement, must be negotiated with the full participation of all members of the international community; 5. Urges all members of the international community to support all efforts to ban prospecting and mining in and around Antarctica and to ensure that all activities are carried out exclusively for the purpose of peaceful scientific investigation and that all such activities ensure the maintenance of international peace and security in Antarctica and the protection of its environment and are for the benefit of all mankind; 6. Expresses the conviction that the establishment through negotiations with the full participation of all members of the international community, of Antarctica as a nature reserve or a world park would ensure the protection and conservation of its environment and its dependent and associated ecosystems for the benefit of all mankind; 7. Also expresses its conviction, in view of the large number of scientific stations and expeditions, that international scientific research should be enhanced through the establishment of

142

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 142

21/12/2016 10:11

Common interest and common heritage in Antarctica  143 i­nternational stations devoted to scientific investigations of global significance, regulated by stringent environmental safeguards, so as to avoid or minimize any adverse impact of human activities on the Antarctic environment and its dependent and associated ecosystems.

These statements, which were in substance repeated in A/RES/45/78 on 12 December 1990, are remarkable. They invoke the common heritage principle, but at the same time modify it to cover the protection of Antarctica as well as the global environment. Further, the common heritage principle as formulated in A/RES/45/78 is meant to also embrace scientific research. Both aspects are not that clearly focused on in Part XI of the Convention, although environmental concerns are now intensively dealt with in the Regulations issued by the International Seabed Authority.5 Apart from that A/RES/45/78 does not seem to contemplate setting up an institutional framework for Antarctica equivalent to the one governing the deep seabed. This demonstrates that the common heritage principle – at least as interpreted by the UN General Assembly in respect of Antarctica – is considered to be flexible. As formulated here it has a core element, namely the protection of common interests, the participation of the international community in negotiating the regime concerned and the participation in benefits; such benefits do not only cover economic benefits, but also the participation in scientific research and the protection against harmful effects on the environment.

VARIOUS MODELS DISCUSSED TO REFLECT THE WIDER INTERESTS IN ANTARCTICA The states negotiating a legal regime for Antarctica discussed various models to accommodate the wider interests for this continent. However, these models have been developed on the basis of international law for the regulation of situations completely different from the legal situation which governs Antarctica. Furthermore, the formulation of the models suggested is highly abstract. They, in fact, embrace a great variety of regimes which differ considerably. The application to Antarctica would raise very specific problems; in particular the question concerning territorial sovereignty in Antarctica. It is a vain hope that the acceptance of such a model would mean that unanimity might be achieved with respect to a concrete regime on Antarctica. To some extent the formulation of these abstract models – and this is especially true for the common heritage concept – was motivated more by political than by legal considerations. Briefly describing these models in this contribution is to highlight the relationship between the Parties to the Antarctic regime and third states. It has been discussed more commonly in academic writings than at the political level whether Antarctica constitutes a condominium or should be made one. To do so would mean that the Consultative Parties would assert sovereignty over Antarctica, including the relevant offshore areas, as a collective cooperative body.6 This certainly does not reflect current political reality in Antarctica. For example, the negotiations on the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat have demonstrated that the transfer of rights from the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties (ATCPs) to an international body is not acceptable to most of the claimant states.7 A trusteeship proposal for Antarctica was discussed in 1947 and 1948.8 It called for a

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 143

21/12/2016 10:11

144  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica trusteeship arrangement under the United Nations as provided for in Articles 75 seq. of the United Nations Charter.9 It was countered by the trivial argument that the trusteeship system is meant to protect humans rather than penguins. This, however, misses the point. Seen from a broader perspective, a trusteeship system is meant to protect wider interests, even community interests, and one could easily envisage a trusteeship for the protection of the environment. A somewhat related model was suggested by Jessup and Taubenfeld10 in 1959 which provided for the surrender of national claims to sovereignty to a supranational body representing only those states possessing claims or at least a basis to them. Such a solution differs from a condominium approach, insofar as those states would not act on the basis of their asserted claims or basis of claims but on the basis of a mandate assumed and exercised on behalf of the world community. Consequently it would entail at least some sort of benefit-­sharing. This approach would reflect institutionally, and in its underlying philosophy, that there are wider interests to take into account in Antarctica, going beyond the interests of the claimant states or even the interests of the ATCPs. The implementation of this approach would at the same time recognize the claims concerning Antarctica and render them irrelevant. However, it would not acknowledge the contributions to Antarctica by non-­claimant states such as the United States, Russia, Japan and Germany, which have been scientifically quite active. Therefore it is doubtful whether such an approach would ever be considered politically acceptable if pursued. Some authors,11 referring to the fact that the deep seabed and its resources as well as the moon and its resources have been declared the common heritage of mankind, argue for the extension of that principle to Antarctica or at least to its mineral resources and their administration by an international authority similar to the Seabed Authority. Those authors regard Antarctica, in spite of the existing territorial claims, as a region, which like the seabed and Outer Space, is shared by all people of the world in common and thus is subject only to international forms of administration.12 However, it is at least highly questionable whether the legal situation of Antarctica can really be treated analogously with the deep seabed. Contrary to the deep seabed a detailed legal system already exists with respect to the Antarctic area. Furthermore, it has to be pointed out that the ATCPs have on several occasions already emphasized their responsibility towards the world community.13 It seems to be much more promising to make this obligation operative than to establish an international bureaucracy. Finally it should be mentioned that environmentalists have voiced serious reservations against exploiting Antarctic mineral resources. They called on governments to institute a moratorium on any resource activities and to establish Antarctica as a World Park under the auspices of the United Nations.14 The Consultative Parties – with the exception of New Zealand which first reacted positively and withdrew its proposal later – however, have shown little interest in such an approach.15 The Madrid Protocol does not reflect the approach as suggested by environmental groups since the ATCPs remain fully in control of Antarctica. Apart from the common heritage approach, none of these models were discussed in depth at the political level. In respect of Antarctica, these models either disregard the reality of territorial claims or the objections existing against them within the international community. The ATCPs tried instead to accommodate some of the core concerns voiced from among the international community so as to improve the external acceptance of the Antarctic legal regime.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 144

21/12/2016 10:11

Common interest and common heritage in Antarctica  145

EXTERNAL ACCEPTANCE OF THE ANTARCTIC LEGAL REGIME An external acceptance of the Antarctic legal regime depends on the increasing protection of the environment as a community interest, the transparency of decisions taken by the Parties in respect of Antarctica and the openness of that regime for accession. This has been well understood by the Consultative Parties. In recent years the Antarctic legal regime has undergone quite some modification in this respect. However, as will be noted, there are indications that the pendulum in favour of an open Antarctic legal regime is swinging back. The Antarctic legal regime consists of the Antarctic Treaty of 1959,16 the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty of 1991 (Madrid Protocol),17 the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources of 1980 (CCAMLR),18 as well as the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals (CCAS) of 1972.19 These core elements of the Antarctic legal regime have been further supplemented and elaborated upon by the Measures of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings20 and an international agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels, 2001 which belongs to the 1979 Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals. It is the objective of the Convention on Albatrosses and Petrels to reduce the mortality of these birds in the context of fishing the Southern Ocean and thus it is closely related to CCAMLR. The question of external acceptance of the Antarctic legal regime became relevant when the Consultative Parties started to negotiate a mineral regime for Antarctica. They claimed to be the custodians exclusively responsible for the governing of Antarctica, which included the elaboration of a future mineral resources regime. This approach is reflected, for example, in Recommendation VIII–8 on ‘Activities of States that are not Consultative Parties’ which addresses acceding states as well as non-­parties. While the recommendation reaffirms that ‘it is in the interest of all mankind that Antarctica shall continue forever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes and shall not become the scene of object of international discord’ it also recognizes that ‘the Antarctic Treaty places a special responsibility on the Contracting Parties to exert appropriate efforts, consistent with the Charter of the United Nations, to the end that no one engages in any activity in the Antarctic Treaty area contrary to the principles or purposes of the Treaty.’ In fact, the reaction of the Consultative Parties to external initiatives has generally been negative, and at times even hostile. For example, in 1975, the Parties blocked an attempted encroachment upon their authority by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and in 1976 a Food and Agriculture Organisation/United Nations Development Program (FAO/ UNDP) project on the utilization of the living resources of the area for the benefit of the world as a whole, and the developing countries in particular.21 With respect to the future mineral resources regime, the Consultative Parties, however, signaled more flexibility. Whereas they underlined, in Recommendation IX–2 on Living Resources, that the Consultative Parties had a prime responsibility with respect to the protection and conservation of the Antarctic environment, such a bold statement was missing in the Recommendations on mineral resources. In Recommendation XI–1 they only stated that the Consultative Parties should continue to play an active and responsible role in dealing with the question of Antarctic mineral resources. It has been mentioned

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 145

21/12/2016 10:11

146  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica further that a regime on mineral resources should include procedures for adherence by states other than the Consultative Parties,22 to provisions for cooperative arrangements between the regime and other relevant international organizations23 and ensure that the special responsibilities of the Consultative Parties in respect of the Antarctic environment are protected, taking into account responsibilities which may be exercised in the area by other international organizations. Finally, they affirmed that no encroachment on the deep seabed would take place.24 Three elements of the statements quoted warrant particular note: ●

the opening of the regime; the acceptance of competing competences of other international organizations in the Antarctic region; and ● the statement that the Antarctic Treaty System has to be regarded as an international institution sui generis.

●●

Basically an identical approach was adopted by the Seventh Conference of the Heads of State or Government of Non-­Aligned Countries held in March 1983. They postulated that activities in Antarctica should be governed by the following principles: ●

taking into account the interests of all mankind; for peaceful purposes only; ●● should not become the scene or object for international discord; ●● free access for all nations; ● widening international cooperation ●●

It is remarkable in the resolution of the Non-­Aligned Countries that they were willing to accept the Consultative Parties as being the ones to govern Antarctic activities under the condition that some obligations are accepted. The main problem with this approach is that neither the Antarctic Treaty or the Madrid Protocol, or the Recommendations of the ATCMs, create binding obligations vis-­à-­vis third states. This, however, seems to be the precondition for an effective protection of the Antarctic environment. It has been argued that the Antarctic Treaty System had to be regarded as an objective territorial regime.25 The essence of an objective regime has been described best by Sir Humphrey Waldock in his third report on international treaties.26 It is, however, questionable whether current international law provides for law-­creating functions of a group of states by which third states are bound contrary to Article 34 and 35 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. The references quoted so far to endorse such a system – for example the General Act of the Conference of Berlin of 1885 – no longer fit into an international law system governed by the principle of equal sovereignty. As already indicated the ATCPs have in fact developed a pragmatic solution which in part accommodates the interests of the international community by accepting that the protection of Antarctica is in the interest of the international community as a whole. This was clearly expressed in the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities of 1988 (CRAMRA) but less so in the Madrid Protocol. The Preamble of CRAMRA stated, among others:

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 146

21/12/2016 10:11

Common interest and common heritage in Antarctica  147 Reaffirming that it is in the interest of all mankind that the Antarctic Treaty area shall continue forever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes and shall not become the scene or object of international discord;

The reference to the interest of mankind as a whole was made in the Madrid Protocol in a different context. There it is stated in the Preamble: Convinced that the development of a comprehensive regime for the protection of the Antarctic environment and dependent and associated ecosystems is in the interest of mankind as a whole.

This is a modified reference to the common heritage principle, avoiding the term ­‘heritage’ which would have been difficult to reconcile with the territorial claims of several of the ATCPs. In the following CRAMRA referred to some but not all and perhaps not the most important elements of the common heritage principle. The Preamble of CRAMRA stated also that: Convinced that the participation in Antarctic mineral resource activities should be open to all States which have an interest in such activities and subscribe to a regime governing them and that the special situation of developing country Parties to the regime should be taken into account;

This objective was further elaborated upon in Article 2, paragraph 3(g) of CRAMRA which stated that in relation to mineral resource activities the interests of the international community are to be taken into account. The idea of participation was further specified in Article 6 of CRAMRA referring in particular to developing countries. The Madrid Protocol does not refer to the issue of participation. This may, in part, be explained by the fact that the Madrid Protocol does not provide for economic activities and there was thought to be less interest in the sharing of responsibilities in the protection of the Antarctic environment. But one could and perhaps should have contemplated the sharing of the results of scientific research. CRAMRA emphasized in this context the special responsibility of the Consultative Parties by stating in the Preamble: Bearing in mind the special legal and political status of Antarctica and the special responsibility of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties to ensure that all activities in Antarctica are consistent with the purposes and principles of the Antarctic Treaty.

This provision was included verbally in the Preamble of the Madrid Protocol, too. The core provision on that issue was Article 7, paragraph 8 of CRAMRA. It stated: The Commission shall draw the attention of any State which is not a party to this Convention to any activity undertaken by that State, its agencies or instrumentalities, natural or juridical persons, ships, aircraft or other means of transportation which, in the opinion of the Commission, affects the implementation of the objectives and principles of this Convention. The Commission shall inform all Parties accordingly.

This is in substance repeated in Article 13, paragraph 5, of the Madrid Protocol. Although CRAMRA did not enter into force and it is most likely that it will in the future be only of academic interest, it is to be noted that the ATCPs went a long way to accommodate the interests and legitimate concerns of third states, and in particular developing countries. But what remains to be acknowledged is that the world community

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 147

21/12/2016 10:11

148  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica has an interest in the preservation of the Antarctic environment for its own sake, but even more so for the impact any environmental degradation may have for the world environment. Further, it is acknowledged that scientific activities should also take into account the interests of the international community. This can be achieved – and efforts are being undertaken to this extent – by providing for an international cooperation in the conduct of research activities and by a wide publication of the results of the research. Both are promoted by the ATCPs in practice. Also it is agreed upon by the ATCPs that Antarctica should not become the scene of international discord. Finally the deliberations within the ATCMs have become more transparent. All these are issues which are also core elements of the common heritage principle. The status of Antarctica as a continent devoted to scientific research and the protection of the environment is, however, possibly put at risk by the unilateral claims of some of the ATCPs to maritime zones – exclusive economic zones and extended continental shelves. Most of the claimant states have claimed an exclusive economic zone.27 As far as extended continental shelves are concerned all states asserting rights to territorial­­sovereignty in Antarctica have made submissions to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS) or at least have submitted preliminary information to it. The policy pursued differs significantly reflecting the legal uncertainties in this respect. New Zealand, France and the United Kingdom have only made partial submissions reserving their rights to submit Antarctic data at a later stage.28 Australia in turn made a full submission in relation to the Antarctic territory it claims asking the CLCS not to take any action for the time being in respect of that part of the outer limits of its claimed territory. Norway followed a similar approach. Argentina, which initially made a full application, later asked the CLCS not to consider the request relating to the Antarctic territory it had claimed. It seems that the claimant states have harmonized their approach in spite of the divergences among them. So far the issue remains open but the claimant states have positioned themselves in order to take further action in respect of their claims to an extended continental shelf. These claims have to be distinguished from other claims to the continental shelves based on the sovereignty of some sub-­Antarctic islands.29 All these unilateral steps are meant to preserve the option of the states concerned so that one day they might be able to engage in mineral resource activities; at the moment – under the Madrid Protocol – such economic activities are ruled out. But apart from that, such unilateral acts might be detrimental to the openness of the Antarctic legal regime so far achieved.

CONCLUDING REMARKS Although by no means the sole source of law for Antarctica, the Antarctic Treaty and the Madrid Protocol are the most comprehensive and widely accepted statement of principles of international law considered applicable to Antarctica. This is true even though the Antarctic Treaty has not been ratified by a majority of countries in the world. Those which have expressed an interest in the area, however, have ratified or have acceded to the Treaty; the membership has significantly increased over the years. The intense cooperation in the fields of scientific research, demilitarization, protection of the environment,

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 148

21/12/2016 10:11

Common interest and common heritage in Antarctica  149 meteorology and communication under the auspices of the Antarctic system is indicative not only of the existence of a legal regime but of its ability and proficiency. Finally, the world community has over twenty years accepted the activities of the Consultative Parties in Antarctica and has thus acquiesced to the latter, the general validity of the Antarctic legal regime as such and the special functions exercised by the Consultative Parties. The world community has furthermore drawn profit from the fact that the Consultative Parties have managed to preserve the Antarctic environment, to prevent a confrontation over the disputed claims and to secure the demilitarization of the area. In short, the Antarctic legal regime has established an effective co-­administration of the area, which has received retrospective tacit acceptance by the world community. The co-­administration rests with the Consultative Parties and is in no way restricted to a small group, but open to all those states who have shown a substantial interest in Antarctic matters. Accordingly, it is up to the Consultative Parties to further develop the Antarctic legal regime. In doing so they must continue to seek to accommodate the interests of the world community and to continue to receive general acceptance for any new development. Their success will entirely depend upon their putting into practice the principles listed in Recommendation XI–1 as well as in the resolution of the Conferences of Non-­Aligned Countries. In particular they should be aware of the dangers which may arise from unilateral actions with regard to maritime areas south of a latitude of 60°S.

NOTES   1. Declaration of Principles Governing the Sea-­Bed and the Ocean Floor, and the Subsoil Thereof, beyond the Limits of National Jurisdiction of 1970, A/RES/2749 (XXV); compare also Wolfrum 2012.   2. 10 December 1982, 1833 UNTS 397.   3. The ‘Question of Antarctica’ was first placed on the agenda of the UN General Assembly in 1983 (A/ RES/38/77 of 15 December 1983, see also A/RES/39/152 of 17 December 1984. It remained an annual topic until 1994 when it became a biannual reference in 1994 and in 1996 a triennial reference. In 2005 it was decided that the issue should not be discussed any longer on a regular basis at the General Assembly (A/RES/60/47).   4. A/RES/41/88 B, of 4 December 1988, paragraph 2; A/RES 42/46[B], of 30 November 1987, paragraph 3.   5. See Wolfrum 2014.   6. See on this approach: Hambro 1974; Wolfrum 1984, 144.   7. Gautier 2015, 194.   8. Wolfrum 1984, 145.   9. For details with respect to the trusteeship solution as proposed by the United States, see Wolfrum 1983, 1. Kap. 3(a). 10. Jessup and Taubenfeld 1959, 171. 11. Honnold 1978, 844; Joyner 1981, 440; Joyner 1992, 127. 12. Honnold 1978, 847–8; Joyner 1992, 441. 13. ATCM, Recommendation IX–1. 14. For further details see Barnes 1982, 30; Honnold 1978, 839. 15. For further details see Mitchell 1977, 101. The Consultative Parties, however, have discussed a respective research program and at the Eighth Consultative Meeting passed a recommendation calling all members of the world community to refrain from commercial exploration and exploitation in order to enable the Treaty Parties to seek ‘timely agreed solutions’ (VIII–14). This voluntary and temporary restraint policy on mineral activities was reviewed by the Consultative Parties at the Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Meetings and remains in force (IX–1 para. 8, X–1, XI–1). For further details on the Antarctic environmental implications of possible mineral exploration and exploitation see Rutford 1986. Further information may be drawn from the study published by the Institute of Polar Studies 1977. 16. 1 December 1959, 402 UNTS 71. 17. 4 October 1991, 30 ILM 1461.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 149

21/12/2016 10:11

150  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica 18. 20 May 1980, 1329 UNTS 48. 19. 1 June 1972, 1080 UNTS 176. 20. According to Decision no. 1 (1995) ‘measures’ refer to a ‘text which contains provisions intended to be legally binding once it has been approved by all Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties in accordance with paragraph 4 of Article IX of the Antarctic Treaty.’ Decisions refer, according to Decision No. 1, to internal organizational matters and resolutions to a hortatory text adopted at an ATCM. See on that Gautier 2015, 193. 21. A detailed analysis of the past attitude of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties regarding third states is to be found in Auburn 1982, 115. 22. Recommendation IX–1 Future regime on Antarctic mineral resource activities, adopted at the Ninth ATCM in London in 1977 – available at http://www.ats.aq/devAS/ats_meetings_meeting_measure. aspx?lang=e. See particularly paragraph 7 (II). 23. Recommendation XI–1 paragraph 7 (III) note also the reference to international organizations in paragraph 7 (V). Provisions envisaging co-­operation with international organizations are found in Article III paragraph 2 Antarctic Treaty, too as well as in Article XXIII of the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. 24. Recommendation XI–1 paragraph 7 (IV). It is most obvious that Rec. XI–1 paragraph 7 (IV) and (5) primarily address the Deep Seabed Authority. 25. Klein 1980, 116. 26. International Law Commission 1964, 26–8. 27. Crawford and Rothwell 1992; Quigg 1983, 173. 28. See: Scott 2013, 27; and for a detailed account and also a description of the negotiation process among the claimant states, see Oude Elferink 2013, 69. 29. See Australia’s Seas and Submerged Lands (Limits of Continental Shelf) Proclamation of 2012. The islands in question are the Heard and McDonald Islands as well as the Macquarie Islands the continental shelves of which stretch south on a latitude of 60°S.

REFERENCES Auburn, F.M. 1982. Antarctic Law and Politics. London: C. Hurst & Co. Barnes, J.N. 1982. Let’s Save Antarctica! Richmond: Greenhouse Publications. Crawford, J. and Rothwell, D.R. 1992. Legal issues confronting Australia’s Antarctica. Australian Yearbook of International Law 13: 53–88. Gautier, P. 2015. The exercise of jurisdiction over activities in Antarctica: A new challenge for the Antarctic system. Pages 192–210 in del Castillo, L. (ed), Law of the Sea, From Grotius to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea: Liber Amicorum Judge Hugo Caminos. Leiden: Brill. Hambro, E. 1974. Some notes on the future on the Antarctic Treaty collaboration. American Journal of International Law 68: 217–26. Honnold, E. 1978. Thaw in international law? Rights in Antarctica under the law of common spaces. The Yale Law Journal 87: 804–59. Institute of Polar Studies. 1977. A Framework for Assessing Environmental Impacts of Possible Antarctic Mineral Development. Columbus: Ohio State University. International Law Commission. 1964. Third Report on the Law of Treaties. Yearbook of the International Law Commission 1964 II: 26–8. Jessup, P.C. and Taubenfeld, H.J. 1959. Controls for Outer Space and the Antarctic Analogy. New York: Columbia University Press. Joyner, C.C. 1981. Antarctica and the law of the sea: Rethinking the current legal dilemma. San Diego Law Review 18: 415–42. Joyner, C.C. 1992. Antarctica and the Law of the Sea. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Klein, E. 1980. Statusvorträge im Völkerrecht. Springer-­Verlag: Berlin. Mitchell, B. 1977. Resources in Antarctica – potential for conflict. Marine Policy 1: 91–101. Oude Elferink, A.G. 2013. The outer limits of the continental shelf in the polar regions. Pages 61–84 in Molenaar, E.J., Oude Elferink, A.G. and Rothwell , D. (eds), The Law of the Sea and Polar Regions: Interactions between Global and Regional Regimes, Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff. Quigg, P.W. 1983. A Pole Apart: The Emerging Issue of Antarctica. New York: McGraw-­Hill. Rutford, R.H. (ed.) 1986. Reports of the SCAR Group of Specialists on Antarctic Environmental Implications of Possible Mineral Exploration and Exploitation (AEIMEE). Cambridge: SCAR. Scott, S.V. 2013. The evolving Antarctic Treaty system: Implications of accommodating developments in the law

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 150

21/12/2016 10:11

Common interest and common heritage in Antarctica  151 of the sea. Pages 17–34 in Molenaar, E.J., Oude Elferink, A.G. and Rothwell, D. (eds), The Law of the Sea and Polar Regions: Interactions between Global and Regional Regimes, Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff. Wolfrum, R. 1983. Die Internationalisierung staatsfreier Räume: Die Entwicklung einer Internationalen Verwaltung für Antarktis, Weltraum, Hohe See und Meeresboden. Heidelberg: Springer-­Verlag. Wolfrum, R. 1984. The use of Antarctic non-­living resources: The search for a trustee? Pages 143–63 in Wolfrum, R. (ed.), Antarctic Challenge. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Wolfrum, R. 2012. Common heritage of mankind. In Wolfrum, R. (ed.), Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law Vol. II. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolfrum, R, 2014. The contribution of the regulations of the International Seabed Authority to the progressive development of international environmental law. Pages 241–9 in Lodge, W.M. and Nordquist, M.H. (eds), Peaceful Order in the World’s Oceans: Essays in Honor of Satya N. Nandan. Leiden: Brill.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 151

21/12/2016 10:11

10.  Modern explorers Peder Roberts

INTRODUCTION Antarctic exploration has long been associated in the public mind with science, but also with adventure, and with the expression of cultural values such as bravery, endurance, fortitude, loyalty, and service. Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott, Douglas Mawson, and others constitute a pantheon that is drawn upon to inspire (and legitimize) Antarctic research in the present. It is perhaps therefore unsurprising that exploration is most strongly associated with a bygone era of heroism and discovery, rather than the more professionalized and, dare one say, mundane work conducted from permanent stations. Feats of travel have become the exception rather than the norm. Yet expeditions continue to be mounted by a variety of individuals and organizations. Science, sport, charity, and personal endeavor are now often joined by commemoration as motives for expeditions. They continue to be part of the fabric of human activity in Antarctica, and their evolution reflects how the continent and its history are perceived and received in the public imagination – revealed most clearly perhaps when controversies arise over whether a particular expedition is legitimate or appropriate. The 2013–14 Spirit of Mawson Expedition is a case in point, with its expressed desire to build on the scientific work of the 1911–1914 Australasian Antarctic Expedition.1 The stranded participants of the expedition endured criticism for causing the diversion of other vessels already committed to supplying polar research stations or participating in ongoing research programs.2 Present-­day explorers, just like their earlier counterparts, continue to act as bearers of cultural and political values – and to be part of larger conversations about who has the right to be present in Antarctica. The goal of this chapter is to combine an overview of Antarctic exploration in the past sixty years or so with an analysis of why exploration – like science – is a means of expressing and performing politics in Antarctica, rather than being exceptional to it. The coverage skews more toward expeditions from the Nordic countries and the English-­speaking world. Partly this is due to my own background and expertise, but the particularly rich national traditions of Antarctic exploration in Britain and Norway make for especially interesting traditions that continue into the present – including through notable individuals such as Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Monica Kristensen.

EXPLORATION AFTER THE END OF DISCOVERY By definition, exploration relies upon the presence of a known space – a domestic (and domesticated) space – from which the explorer comes and to which he or she returns. It is here, as Michael Robinson has pointed out with regard to Arctic expeditions, that the process of giving meaning to an act of exploration takes place.3 The expectations of a 152

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 152

21/12/2016 10:11

Modern explorers  153 society and culture shape the expeditions that originate from it. This does not mean that an explorer is a perfect reflection of a social context, but it does mean that the merits and accomplishments of the explorer and the expedition are inevitably judged in regard to that society’s norms and expectations.4 To be a good explorer is not to act in accordance with any timeless criterion of excellence but rather to succeed within gendered, nationalized, and racialized frames defined by time and place.5 This means that all acts of exploration are also expressions of culture – and to a certain extent of politics, particularly in Antarctica. Beau Riffenburgh has argued that exploration became a hot media commodity in the nineteenth century.6 The North and South Poles (geographic, but also magnetic) became targets to be reached not because they were strategically, economically, or even scientifically important, but because the act of reaching them conferred honor upon those who performed (and sponsored) the feat of travel. The superb murals that decorate the interior domes of the University of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute (and which today enrich its museum section) depict the Polar Regions, as known at the time of the building’s opening in 1934. The names of the explorers responsible for filling in the map accompany pictures of the ships that carried them. Although the Institute’s founding director, Frank Debenham, argued that the murals were not intended to be a roll call of honor, that was precisely the function they served.7 Antarctic explorers were more than just instruments of data collection; they were also heroes – and they were in the main men who were white, British, and heterosexual. As Lisa Bloom recognized, the body of the hero was one shaped by the intersectionality of class, gender, race, and nationalism.8 The 1911 race to the South Pole between Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott captured the spirit of the age perfectly. But Amundsen’s success did not spell the end of Antarctic exploration as a form of contest between human rivals. The rapid development of polar aviation opened up new ways to establish the Pole as an aerial goal, and the booming whaling industry also encouraged a form of competitive exploration – charting coastlines and whale populations – that brought echoes of the Scott–Amundsen rivalry when Norwegian and British Imperial expeditions once again strove to achieve priority.9 After 1945 states began to invest increasingly large sums in ongoing Antarctic research programs and permanent stations. The International Geophysical Year of 1957 –58 (IGY) gave a state the right to claim a political voice in Antarctica with its investment in Antarctic science, rather than assuming that such rights derived from historical achievement and resource exploitation. When Vivian Fuchs and Edmund Hillary led the Commonwealth Trans-­Antarctic Expedition (CTAE) through the first crossing of the Antarctic continent in 1958, relying upon mechanized vehicles rather than dog-­sleds or man-­hauling, the expedition proclaimed itself in sympathy with the activities of the IGY. But it also drew heavily upon a historical justification – the fulfillment of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-­fated plan to traverse the Antarctic continent from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea – in addition to a longer tradition of British exploration dating back to the first Elizabethan era.10 Other IGY expeditions similarly used feats of travel to win renown, notably the Soviet Union’s establishment of a station at the Pole of Inaccessibility and the US decision to establish a station at the geographic South Pole. When the Antarctic Treaty was negotiated at Washington DC in December 1959 the new political order became codified in international law – one that in effect inscribed the dynamics of the IGY upon the continent’s governance into the future.11 Surely the age of the heroic individual explorer was over?

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 153

21/12/2016 10:11

154  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Although much changed in Antarctic science and politics in the years leading up to the Antarctic Treaty, two factors remained important (if sometimes contested): the role of history in both legitimizing and inspiring further efforts by nations and their individual citizens, and the status of Antarctica as an arena in which the strength and vitality of nations could be measured. The massive post-­1945 projection of logistical power by the superpowers, particularly the United States, could be regarded as a challenge to the existing political hierarchy in Antarctica, itself derived strongly from history. By refusing to recognize the territorial claims of other states or to make claims of their own (though reserving the right to perhaps do so in the future), the United States and the Soviet Union sought to de-­privilege historical acts of exploration as foundations for contemporary political power. The most important consequence was the agreement that activities conducted during the IGY would not be regarded as relevant in terms of sovereignty claims. History, nonetheless, remained an important political and cultural resource to states such as Britain and Norway, which recognized that they would never be able to compete with the superpowers in terms of logistical and scientific investment. Even if the Antarctic Treaty froze territorial claims based on prior activity, the legacy of historical achievement remained a valuable asset that states could draw upon to justify participation in the Treaty system even if their recent Antarctic activities were less spectacular. The CTAE exemplified the value of a historical tradition in which contemporary acts could be located. Britain’s contribution to the scientific work of the IGY might be limited in comparison to the superpowers, but a feat of travel that highlighted earlier British imperial deeds provided highly visible evidence of the continued vitality of the British nation in a new Elizabethan era.12 The commemoration of the past through feats of exploration in the present was more than a passive following of existing footsteps. To complete Shackleton’s unfinished quest was only a valuable task if Shackleton himself was recognized as a figure worth commemorating, and his planned voyage a task worth completing. Emulation and commemoration thus cemented the legacies upon which political and scientific legitimacy could be built. The combination of science, exploration, and historical commemoration was not unique to the CTAE. Consider the British surveyor and later professional explorer, author and artist Wally Herbert (1934–2007), who participated in an expedition under the New Zealand Antarctic program in 1961–62 that crossed much the same terrain as Amundsen had done fifty years earlier en route to the South Pole. Herbert’s account of the journey, published in the Geographical Journal in December 1963, was entitled ‘In Amundsen’s Tracks on the Axel Heiberg Glacier’. The choice of the Pole as a destination was justified not by novelty, but by efficiency and safety (Herbert’s party could be returned by air if they reached the American airstrip at the Pole).13 The decision to follow Amundsen’s route down the Axel Heiberg Glacier, despite headlining his presentation to the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), emerged as an alternative ‘suitable climax’ once permission to head for the Pole was denied.14 It became the most prominent part of the journey in large part because it provided new perspectives on a story with enduring public interest. Herbert’s expedition might be seen as embodying a moment of geopolitical rather than exploratory transition. Although he relied upon the resources of the United States for support, and was present in Antarctica under the aegis of a more general program of scientific reconnaissance, many aspects of Antarctic travel were similar to the days of Scott and Amundsen. When Herbert described himself as ‘a fellow sledging man’ to Amundsen,

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 154

21/12/2016 10:11

Modern explorers  155 and thus qualified to pronounce authoritatively upon the Norwegian’s journey, he referenced a commonality of experience derived from their shared usage of skis and dog-­sleds, although Herbert had the luxury of radio and air support. By following in Amundsen’s footsteps, Herbert argued that he not only expanded upon the sparse descriptions that Amundsen provided of the terrain, but also demonstrated that the Norwegian’s journey was ‘a triumph of courage, experience and good sportsmanship’ (even if Herbert thought it had included some questionable choices in terms of route planning). The journey derived additional meaning from its quality of being a form of recreation that could illuminate a historical event, and thus intervene in ‘the controversy that has lasted intermittently among certain armchair explorers, over whether Amundsen was lucky to get there first.’15 ‘There is only one way to unravel the mysteries of a previous explorer’s route,’ Herbert wrote, ‘and that is to travel the same route at the same time of year, by the same method of transport.’16 How the journey was achieved became the crucial aspect of its novelty – a characteristic that would come to define the era of modern polar exploration that followed, and in which Herbert himself would play a pivotal role. His Antarctic experiences have been described as ‘a rich and rewarding apprenticeship’ for the Arctic deeds for which he became famous later in the 1960s.17 While dog-­sleds would remain part of Antarctic logistics for another thirty years, large-­scale Antarctic journeys were increasingly the province of tracked vehicles and aircraft, as exemplified by the CTAE. The changing nature of Antarctic exploration was driven by cultural politics as well as technology. As formal European empires faded into history, the geographical conquests of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the age of ‘Geography Militant’ seemed increasingly out of step with the times, particularly when the real frontiers of human endeavor were now regarded to be in space (or perhaps the deep oceans).18 When RGS Secretary Sir Laurence Kirwan reflected on recent trends in British exploration in 1964, he noted that ‘youthful expeditions of the training type’ – concerned mostly with helping young researchers to conduct fieldwork – were becoming the Society’s main concern.19 The cost alone almost entirely ruled out the Antarctic: in the four years prior, only one of the 184 expeditions the Society sponsored visited that continent (whereas sixty-­two were concerned with the Arctic or sub-­Arctic). Kirwan’s claim that the label ‘explorer’ was no longer appropriate for young scientists further reinforced a sense that Antarctica was now the preserve of state-­sponsored research rather than acts of exploration, even if Antarctic research remained dominated by white men. The former was part of the present; the latter a relic of the past. Similar currents might be detected in popular culture. In 1970 the comedy troupe Monty Python satirized the pious veneration of Scott in a sketch entitled ‘Scott of the Sahara’. Works such as Scott’s Men by David Thomson (1977) pointed to a more nuanced understanding of Britain’s great Antarctic heroes.20 The journalist Roland Huntford’s 1979 dual biography of Scott and Amundsen took this revisionism to its extreme, presenting a stark contrast between coolly efficient Norwegians and hapless Britons. Huntford’s book gained widespread popularity even as it aroused fury among many in the British polar establishment, for the personal nature of its criticism of Scott (and his patron Clements Markham) and for its notorious accusation that the geological specimens that Scott’s party collected on the return journey were ‘a pathetic little gesture to salvage something from defeat at the Pole and the wreck of their hopes’.21 The heroes of the past were clearly no longer so useful in the present.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 155

21/12/2016 10:11

156  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

EXPLORATION FIT FOR THE PRESENT The most well-­known Antarctic explorer of modern times – Sir Ranulph Fiennes – has exemplified how feats of travel have re-­emerged as legitimate forms of activity on the Antarctic continent. Born in 1944, Fiennes attended the prestigious Eton College and eventually joined the elite Special Air Services regiment, although a rebellious streak helped push him off the standard path of advancement within the armed services.22 Following a stint fighting against left-­wing rebels in Oman, Fiennes headed a rafting expedition down the great rivers of British Columbia that attracted considerable notoriety thanks to a BBC documentary film that painted an unflattering portrait of his leadership skills. After several years of preparation he launched the ‘Trans-­Globe Expedition’ from London, which aimed to make the first traverse of the entire earth via both geographical Poles (1979–82).23 The timing for the expedition was more auspicious than it might have seemed at the time. Fiennes complained that when he first started planning the expedition in the mid-­ 1970s, ‘patriotism . . . was no longer openly considered a worthwhile motive . . . Perhaps I was born too late in the scheme of things because to me a man’s country can be worth living for, dying for and “doing” for’.24 The disjuncture between Fiennes’s ambitions and the prevailing current of British Antarctic policy was further revealed by the negative attitude of the Foreign Office, which Fiennes regarded as having decided that keeping ‘private individuals out of Antarctica . . . was their unwritten duty’.25 The expedition ultimately became a reality in part because of Fiennes’s skill as a fundraiser, including attracting well-­placed patrons (such as Prince Charles) and advisers from within the British polar establishment such as Sir Vivian Fuchs, an explorer of considerable standing thanks to his leadership of the CTAE, in addition to being a long-­serving head of the British Antarctic Survey. The Antarctic overwintering that the expedition conducted drew part of its justification through science – a range of meteorological, atmospheric, and other observations were conducted – but Fiennes never claimed that it was a scientific enterprise in the manner of those associated with state-­backed Antarctic programs. Rather, the expedition articulated a set of values that Fiennes deemed characteristic of the British nation, from courage and endurance through feats of travel to trade and enterprise (by showcasing British wares through his expedition and concluding trade deals during his stops in metropolitan centers). Most notable was the embrace of a form of nationalism that consciously associated vitality in the present with the celebration of values that had made Britain great in the past, and which could ensure its greatness in the future. Here his timing was impeccable, coming in the midst of concern that the UK was the ‘sick man of Europe’, its post-­war history marked by the loss of empire and influence abroad, and industrial decline and economic strife at home. The form of Britishness that Fiennes sought to defend and perpetuate found a new lease of life in the Thatcher years. The 1982 Falklands War exemplified the revival of a more muscular British nationalism, capable of projecting power around the globe (including on the doorstep of the Antarctic) in defense of national interests.26 It is tempting to see Fiennes’s expedition as a turning point of sorts in legitimizing Antarctic exploration in the post-­ATS (Antarctic Treaty System) age. The obstructive attitude that Fiennes recalled in the Foreign Office when he first attempted to secure permissions softened to the point that by the early 1980s, feats of endurance that looked ­backward

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 156

21/12/2016 10:11

Modern explorers  157 rather than forward could be seriously countenanced by officialdom. Nevertheless, the very different experience of the 1985–86 ‘Footsteps of Scott’ Expedition, an attempt by two Britons (Robert Swan and Roger Mear) and a Canadian (Gareth Wood) to man-­haul along Scott’s route to the South Pole, reveals that not all decision-­making bodies felt the same way. The three men recalled being treated with outright hostility by the staff at the United States-­run South Pole station (the official title of which, the Amundsen–Scott Station, must have seemed ironic), and essentially forced into accepting United States logistical support after the ship that was to take them home was lost. That support served to emphasize the power of the United States to control activities in Antarctica, even the citizens of other states.27 A letter to The Times by the expedition’s more prominent patrons and backers decried the threat this precedent posed to ‘properly planned and supported’ expeditions that fell outside the category of state-­sponsored Antarctic science.28 By insisting that the expeditioners needed to be rescued by state agencies, the United States had reasserted a view of the Antarctic as an unsuitable space for private actors – and thus legitimized its own role as a guardian of Antarctic activity. While disavowing any notion of a ‘race’, Fiennes was keenly aware, even on the Trans-­ Globe Expedition, that Britain’s history of polar achievement was entangled with that of Norway, and that the delineation of feats of travel as legitimate achievements was dependent upon adherence to a code of behavior (in the case of the Trans-­Globe Expedition this meant no air travel). Matti Goksøyr aptly named his landmark study of modern polar exploration Kappløp i gamle spor (new ‘races along old tracks’), referencing the strategic importance of history as a resource for legitimizing activity in the present – and creating a form of kinship between the heroes of yesterday and the explorers of today – but also the fundamental importance of rules analogous to those that govern competitive sport.29 The glaciologist and explorer Monica Kristensen’s 1986–87 expedition to the South Pole, commemorating the seventy-­fifth anniversary of Amundsen’s original expedition, ended in failure, as she was forced to turn back before the Pole. As such, it did not win acclaim within Norway – but Kristensen was feted abroad, particularly at the RGS, which awarded her its Gold Medal in 1989. Her compatriots Børge Ousland and Erling Kagge beat a number of rivals to become the first expedition to reach the North Pole unsupported in 1990, although the third member of their party (Geir Randby) was evacuated by air early in the journey after injuring his back. Even though all of Randby’s equipment and food rations were evacuated with him, Fiennes – one of their main competitors – compared the rescue of Randby to doping in an Olympic competition.30 The fact that Fiennes made his protest to the RGS only accentuated the sense of reviving a historical rivalry, particularly as the RGS President at the time of Amundsen’s original triumph had been accused of diminishing the achievement by highlighting the Norwegian’s reliance upon sledge-­dogs.31 Media coverage of this new race to the North Pole in turn made it easier to attract sponsorship for similar expeditions to the Antarctic. Fiennes and Kagge were again at the forefront. The comparisons between past and present were clear – too clear perhaps. The Scottish journalist James Buchan, who was at the South Pole to cover Kagge’s arrival, sardonically described the whole episode as ‘a hopeless attempt to escape the present into some more heroic and difficult age’.32 Kagge succeeded in reaching the South Pole solo, unsupported, and by skis on 7 January 1993, ahead of Fiennes and his companion Mike Stroud, a medical doctor (and nutrition expert). Fiennes and Stroud then continued toward the Ross Sea but had to abandon their journey before completing a full traverse.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 157

21/12/2016 10:11

158  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Kagge became something of a celebrity, reveling in his triumph over the Britons in addition to the glory of having completed his great feat.33 Like Scott before them, Fiennes and Stroud were able to point to higher purposes: they attempted a longer journey, on foot rather than on skis, and used their expedition as a fund-­raising mission for the Multiple Sclerosis Society (they had done this too for their North Pole expedition). The political value of these expeditions evolved from an evocation of national values to a more explicit articulation of state priorities.34 Kristensen subsequently led two further Antarctic expeditions, both tasked with finding Amundsen’s original tent and bringing it back to Norway in time for the 1994 Winter Olympic Games in Lillehammer. An iconic relic from arguably the most famous ski trip of all time would lend gravitas to a festival of athletic competition between nations. Both expeditions ended in failure, the second tragically so when her companion, Jostein Helgeland, was killed in a fall into a crevasse. Accusations of haste and poor planning (the second expedition occurred only months before the Olympic Games were due to open) spoke to a sense that Kristensen was measured against Norway’s proud Antarctic tradition, especially as Amundsen (and then Kagge) had defined it so strongly in terms of meticulous attention to planning. Nationally based contrasts between Norwegians and Britons, forged in the time of Amundsen and Scott and continued by Kagge and Fiennes, produced high public expectations and a negative judgment when Kristensen failed to meet them. This may well have hindered her compatriot Liv Arnesen’s attempts to raise money for a South Pole expedition later in 1994 – a trip she successfully if somewhat unspectacularly completed. Somewhat more attention went to another 1994 expedition to the Pole, this time headlined by Cato Zahl Pedersen, who had lost all of one arm and half of the other in a ­childhood accident. Pedersen, a decorated Paralympic athlete, was awarded the prestigious honor of reading the Olympic Oath at Lillehammer only months before the expedition. In many ways he symbolized the synthesis of two themes in modern Antarctic exploration: the importance of personal struggle and achievement (demonstrating that disability was no impediment to conquering a physical challenge) and the enduring importance of demonstrating a more general national vitality through the completion of feats of endurance, which even if fundamentally individual in nature could be located within a wider frame of national competition. The value of history as a strategic resource to modern explorers became abundantly clear in Fiennes’s 2003 biography of Robert Falcon Scott.35 Engaging and well written, the book wove together an account of Scott’s life and work with Fiennes’s own experiences in the Antarctic. Scott the bungler was reinstated as Scott the hero, less through the attribution of organizational brilliance, but rather through the traits of persistence, doggedness, and bravery. Fiennes drew upon his own experiences to authenticate the severity of the ordeal to which Scott and his men subjected themselves. The harshness of the Antarctic was made more real to the reader through reference to the ordeals that Fiennes himself endured, buttressed by quantitative records of suffering, such as the results gathered by Stroud – for whom the expedition provided a valuable set of data on the body’s response to extreme stresses. The narrative thus linked past and present in a mutually reinforcing embrace: Scott’s vindication was also a vindication of the man who chose to follow in those difficult footsteps. Fiennes forcefully presented Huntford’s lack of Antarctic experience as a barrier to understanding the full nature of Scott’s significance – giving Fiennes a privileged position as a historian rather than simply as a traveler. The book’s final section,

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 158

21/12/2016 10:11

Modern explorers  159 a forthright attack on Huntford’s character and historical methods, charged Huntford with an almost malignant unwillingness to understand the truth, preferring instead a fictionalized story that conformed to the revisionist spirit of the 1970s.36 Despite losing parts of several fingers to frostbite and suffering a major heart attack, Fiennes has continued to plan new expeditions that seek to keep alive the spirit of an earlier age. His aborted attempt to cross the Antarctic during the southern winter of 2013 claimed to tackle ‘the last true remaining polar challenge and the expedition’s success will reassert Britain’s status as the world’s greatest nation of explorers’.37 The expedition also planned ‘unique and invaluable scientific research that will help climatologists, as well as forming the basis for an education program that will reach up to 100,000 schools across the Commonwealth’. Echoes of the CTAE are not hard to discern: tracks from the past would be followed in a manner befitting the values of the present. When a badly frostbitten hand forced Fiennes to drop out of his expedition in February 2013, he described himself as ‘very frustrated’, and joked that the journey would doubtless be completed first by Norwegians on skis (the expedition was to use tracked vehicles) while pointing to the expedition’s value in raising money for charity.38

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF AMUNDSEN – AND THE VIKINGS? However, the peak of Norwegian–British rivalry in modern Antarctic exploration has now perhaps passed. Kagge, Ousland, and Kristensen have faded from the front pages. The most prominent Norwegian expedition of recent times was the 2011 commemorative journey organized by the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) to celebrate the centenary of Amundsen’s conquest of the South Pole, and the sesquicentenary of Fridtjof Nansen’s birth. The conflation of the two events into a single anniversary allowed for a celebration that touched on diverse themes – science, nationalism, feats of travel, even ­statesmanship – within the overall rubric of Norwegian achievement in the polar regions. Styled as ‘informational outreach’, the expedition used the specific act of travel as a means of illuminating a larger historical tradition that embraced skiing and adventure as well as science.39 The four men who composed the expedition each had designations that reflected an aspect of this tradition: the skier (triple Olympic gold medalist Vegard Ulvang), the scientist (hydrologist and NPI chief Jan-­Gunnar Winther), the adventurer (mountaineer and explorer Stein P. Aasheim), and the historian (official NPI historian Harald Dag Jølle). The specific form of historical recreation – skiing in Amundsen’s tracks – was narrated by the explorers to audiences back in Norway via blogs.40 Amundsen’s diary was a constant point of reference, but the snippets of Antarctic history that entered the blogs also included such episodes as the Soviet expedition to the Pole of Inaccessibility during the IGY, suggesting that Amundsen provided a framework around which a wider story could be spun. Themes such as climate change were acknowledged without ever being mobilized as the central justifications for making the journey. Rather, the texts that accompanied the expedition and clarified its meaning for audiences in Norway (and beyond) focused on the past as much as the present of Antarctica. There was, however, one important difference from a century earlier – the absence of any sense of a race against British rivals (a proposal that had been tentatively floated by the British armed services in 2010 to their Norwegian counterparts was never developed or taken up).41

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 159

21/12/2016 10:11

160  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica The choice of such an expedition as an appropriate form of commemoration was a political one. As an officially sanctioned activity of Norway’s peak body for projecting authority in the polar regions, the expedition carried the imprimatur of the state in a manner that not even Nansen or Amundsen enjoyed. Notes of controversy were raised even before its departure – particularly against Winther. Kjetil Solvik Olsen of the then-­ opposition Progress Party claimed that while it was undoubtedly a great adventure for the participants, the expedition was a poor use of taxpayers’ money.42 Eystein Jansen, director of the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research in Bergen, questioned the expedition’s scientific value and by extension whether it constituted an appropriate activity for the NPI.43 But if Jansen’s comment reflected the ATS-­era consensus among states over what activities deserved greatest support in Antarctica, it did not address the objective that the expedition sought to attain – of commemorating a historical legacy upon which contemporary activities were built, rather than exemplifying the state of the art in 2011. The official NPI expedition contrasts dramatically with the most infamous – and tragic  – expedition of the last decades, led by the adventurer Jarle Andhøy. In this instance the political significance of the expedition lies not in its articulation of a set of official values, but rather in what its transgressions reveal concerning the nature of political authority in the Antarctic. Andhøy, the son of a diplomat, developed a passion for sailing at a young age. He recounts feeling ill at ease at school and driven to challenge the boundaries of the ‘civilized’ world (not unlike Fiennes), a sentiment that led him to begin voyaging to the Arctic.44 Andhøy’s fame in Norway derived not from exploration per se, but rather through his colorful presentation of his work in the media. Through books and then documentary films (aired on the state broadcaster NRK) Andhøy presented his cruises first to the Antarctic Peninsula and then to Svalbard and through the Northwest Passage as adventures rather than serious expeditions – a direct contrast with the cultural expectations that frame modern polar research.45 Throughout he cultivated a laddish image characterized by novelty-­style Viking helmets, plenty of drinking, and an irreverent attitude to shibboleths such as science and environmental protection. Sailing in yachts named Berserk and claiming to follow in the wake of the ancient greats, Andhøy became a well-­known presence in Norwegian entertainment, if not a rival to more serious figures such as Børge Ousland. The Svalbard trip resulted in charges of breaking environmental regulations, by approaching a polar bear and a walrus, compounded by sailing without insurance or appropriate permissions. The disdain for regulations and paperwork strikes the reader (or  viewer) as thoroughly in keeping with the persona he crafted, another means of ­articulating his resistance to the conventions of the modern world. Disaster struck when Andhøy returned to Antarctica in 2010 with the quixotic aim of reaching the South Pole by snow-­scooter, thus performing his own centenary homage to Amundsen. After depositing Andhøy and his companion Samuel Massie on the Antarctic coast, the Berserk and its three crew members disappeared in the Ross Sea during a severe storm in February 2011. Although its distress beacon was sounded, leading to a search involving the New Zealand Navy and the Sea Shepherd vessel Steve Irwin, no trace of the yacht or its three occupants was found, with the exception of a single life raft. Andhøy admitted that he had no search and rescue agreement and no insurance, but questioned whether they were strictly necessary. He also cited a brief encounter on television with Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, in which Stoltenberg commented to the

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 160

21/12/2016 10:11

Modern explorers  161 effect that Norway had a territorial claim in Antarctica and that Andhøy should travel there, which Andhøy interpreted as a formal invitation.46 Nonetheless, he was promptly charged with proceeding to Antarctic waters without satisfying the NPI that he had provided sufficient proof that he would adhere to the relevant regulations. Andhøy returned to the Ross Sea in early 2012, to collect gear, search for traces of the Berserk, and conduct a memorial ceremony, again without permission from the NPI.47 He also began to doubt the official version of events concerning the loss of the Berserk, opening another front in his conflict with Antarctic officialdom. Andhøy raised the stakes further in a February 2015 documentary broadcast on the independent channel TV Norge. Here he reiterated his earlier claim that the crew of the Berserk would not have left their anchorage in the sheltered Horseshoe Bay and sailed out into a forecast storm without good reason. His concern focused on the New Zealand Navy, which Andhøy accused of ‘decid[ing] to hide their traces and leave’ during the search.48 The New Zealand authorities strenuously denied any suggestion that they had evicted the Berserk from its anchorage, or been less than enthusiastic in the consequent search, stressing in a media release that the ship dispatched in response to the distress signal (HMNZS Wellington) had performed creditably in extremely difficult conditions.49 The NPI, which was again concerned about Andhøy sailing in Antarctic waters without insurance and without notifying the authorities of his plans,50 now faced claims from Andhøy that it was more concerned with prosecuting him and policing who could be in the Antarctic than with the safety of those present.51 The contrasts between the official and unofficial commemoration of the Amundsen centenary were stark, and not only because they had such vastly different results. Andhøy’s claim that his three colleagues lost their lives due to indifference (at best) from state authorities disputed the effectiveness of state authority in the Antarctic, but also its legitimacy. The latter point was made forcefully in 2012 when he returned to the Antarctic with a man who did not carry a passport, in a ship bearing the pirate flag.52 Andhøy’s case focuses attention on how the ATS structure frames the politics of exploration today – and on the necessity for states to cooperate to ensure compliance.53 Andhøy too appears to have perhaps recognized this point.54 It is significant that when he was unexpectedly acquitted in February 2016 of being illegally present in the Antarctic the year before, his argument relied on having notified the Argentinian authorities (rather than the NPI), rather than denying that such notification was necessary.55 The importance of science in articulating legitimate presence has been well d ­ ocumented,56 and since the signing of the Madrid Protocol environmental protection has become a further imperative to state authority. Restrictions upon the introduction of ‘alien’ biota to the Antarctic rely upon particular conceptions of both the continent (as a wilderness to be kept pure from the rest of the world) and the political regime required to guarantee that preservation (one capable of regulating the presence of people in Antarctica). Explorers are not usually considered ecological threats – although it is striking how many appeal to the value of their presence for environmental research. Nonetheless, the imperative to preserve a state of ecological purity provides a powerful lever for policing the presence of individuals such as Andhøy. The enforcement of such codes constitutes evidence of active Norwegian participation in the good governance of Antarctica. It is worth noting that IAATO (the International Association of Antarctic Tourism Operators) applauded Andhøy’s initial conviction, reinforcing the status of its own members as subscribers to the system that Andhøy’s actions have challenged.57

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 161

21/12/2016 10:11

162  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica As Klaus Dodds and Alan Hemmings have argued in a comment on Australian Antarctic politics, the framing of Antarctica as a space in need of protection from outside occupation remains real in a more direct sense – one harking back to Cold War-­era anxieties about territory falling into the hands of rivals.58 Here the status of modern Antarctic explorers as legitimate representatives of nation-­states becomes highly relevant. The work that Fiennes has done to establish himself as a serious figure respectful of both traditions and conventions in Antarctica has been crucial to establishing his legitimacy – whereas Andhøy has reveled in his infamy (including a ‘cacophony of horny women’ praising him online).59 States remain important, often decisive, sources of logistical support; ‘privateer’ ventures in the style of Andhøy’s (the ‘Footsteps of Scott’ Expedition is another example) are limited by lack of access to the network of bases that make up almost the entirety of human presence on the continent. This negative form of authority – the denial of assistance to explorers as a means of preventing their presence – conforms to the norms underpinning the ATS, and enables states to ensure that explorers as well as scientists are part of wider state structures. This is why the most controversial aspect of Andhøy’s claims concerns allegations of a positive form of authority, by contributing to the Berserk leaving its anchorage. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that Andhøy’s website carries a rousing endorsement of the Steve Irwin’s role in the search for the lost vessel in the same breath as the New Zealand Navy is criticized for allegedly pressuring the Berserk to head into dangerous waters and then searching for it in a less than wholly committed manner.60 The ‘commentary’ on this page from Captain Paul Watson praised the ‘passion for adventure and knowledge’ that drew people from all nations to the Antarctic, stressing the fundamental unity of all those who venture to Antarctica rather than drawing distinctions between those whose presence was endorsed by state authority and those whose was not. Yet Watson’s own presence was hardly free of political significance. Sea Shepherd’s long-­running quest to demarcate legitimate from illegitimate actions in the world’s oceans may not conform to the boundaries of acceptable behavior laid down by states, but it does rely upon a recognition that not all actions on the high seas (or in Antarctic waters) are equally legitimate. The act of commemorative exploration could neatly serve these ends: at the Bay of Whales, where Amundsen established his base camp, Watson and his crew ‘posed with a banner and the Norwegian flag to respectfully honor Amundsen’s achievement, and to appeal to Norway to recognize this achievement by ending the killing of whales’.61 Watson apparently held out little hope of changing Norwegian policy, but it is a powerful reminder that modern explorers appropriate the past to articulate ambitions and anxieties in the present. Watson, Andhøy, and the NPI each used Amundsen’s expedition as an anchor for their own activities in the Antarctic.

CONCLUSIONS Felix Driver opened his classic study of cultures of exploration with the anthropologist Claude Lévi-­Strauss’s bitter rebuke from 1973 of explorers as being producers not of ‘hitherto unknown facts after years of study’ but rather of ‘lantern-­slides or motion pictures, preferably in color, so as to fill a hall with an audience for several nights in ­succession’.62 Lévi-­Strauss was interested in the tropics rather than the poles, but Driver

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 162

21/12/2016 10:11

Modern explorers  163 is correct to interpret his disquiet as an expression of the longer and broader concern to demarcate ‘sober science’ from ‘sensational discovery’.63 Antarctica today is the paradigmatic example of a space for the former. Historian Tom Griffiths has noted that the lines between tourism and exploration have become blurred, in the sense of experiences being packaged for well-­paying visitors seeking to recreate the experiences of a vivid past.64 Parallels might be drawn to the commercialization of Mount Everest, particularly as journeys to the South Pole are no longer defined by whether the goal was reached, but how, and by whom (being the youngest, oldest, least supported, and so forth). All forms of geographical goal are in some degree arbitrary, some less so (such as the geographic poles or crossings from one coastline to another) and some more so (such as the Pole of Inaccessibility). History functions as an important resource for legitimizing some goals over others. Commemoration foregrounds that connection to the past and in a sense renders the act of exploring successful in part simply by drawing attention to that connection. Anniversaries have offered particularly rich fare. However, the question most worth asking is perhaps how the legacy of each historical expedition is (re)defined through the act of commemoration. Related to this is the role of the past in validating actions in the present, for commemoration or following in the footsteps of the famous demands that the first set of tracks be worth following. Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Erling Kagge, and others are occasionally referred to as modern-­day Scotts or Amundsens, and the legitimizing power of history is frequently deployed to create a lineage between modern-­day explorers and their revered predecessors. This is why Fiennes’s biography of Robert Falcon Scott is a window into its author as much as its subject, and why the depiction of Scott as a serious and scientifically minded figure doomed by misfortune rather than poor planning is so fiercely defended in opposition to the view of Scott the bungler. It is essential to recognize the active work of constructing that connection – of defining what qualities were essential to past heroes, and then identifying them in the explorers of the present – rather than regarding the connection as a straightforward continuation. Thinking of history as a resource means acknowledging its potential to advance political goals in a manner determined in the present. This in turn forces us to recognize the inherently political character of modern Antarctic exploration. The deeds of Fiennes constitute evidence that exploration can articulate values consistent with those of the states who compose the ATS, reinforcing rather than challenging the Treaty regime, even if the misfortunes of Roger Mear, Robert Swan, Gareth Wood, and Jarle Andhøy illustrate the need for expeditions to conform to overarching political–legal structures. Far from being an arena for the performance of feats that are fundamentally human rather than national, the early twenty-­first century Antarctic is a highly regulated space in which human presence is strictly controlled. Yet the past continues to live, as the material from which conventions and codes of expectation can be constructed in order to shape the frames for contemporary action. This is the space within which explorers now operate – in terms of political as well as physical geographical terrain.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The author wishes to thank Harald Dag Jølle of the Norwegian Polar Institute for very helpful commentary upon earlier drafts of this chapter.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 163

21/12/2016 10:11

164  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

NOTES   1.   2.   3.   4.   5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Spirit of Mawson 2016. Roberts 2014. Robinson 2006. Francis 2007. Bloom 1993. Riffenburgh 1993. Roberts 2011a, p. 80. Bloom 1993. Roberts 2011b. Dodds 2002. Launius 2010; Dodds 1998. Dodds 2005. Herbert 1963. Herbert 1963, 398. Herbert 1963, 397. Herbert 1963, 400. Hanbury-­Tenison 2010, 190. The term was coined by Joseph Conrad. See also Driver 2001. Kirwan 1964, 225. Thomson 1977. Huntford 1979, 556–7. See also Jones 2014. Fiennes has recounted his early life in two autobiographical works (2000, 2007). Fiennes 1983. Fiennes 1983, 20. Fiennes 1983, 29. The FCO’s chief ‘polar pundit’ – Brian Roberts – had also opposed Fuchs’s trans-­ Antarctic crossing almost twenty years earlier on very similar grounds. Dodds 2002. Mear and Swan 1987. See also Griffiths 2007, 332–4. The letter appeared in The Times on 29 March 1986 and is reproduced in Swan and Mear 1987, 272. Goksøyr 2004. Goksøyr 2004, 313. See for instance Jones 2003, 90. Buchan 1993. See for instance Kagge 2006. Material in this paragraph and that which follows draws heavily upon Goksøyr 2004, which will likely remain the definitive work on the history of modern Norwegian polar exploration for many years. An abridged version of Goksøyr’s original chapter appears in English in Drivenes and Jølle 2006, 451–79. Fiennes 2003. Fiennes 2003, 366–91. Anonymous 2013. Siddique 2013. http://sorpolen2011.npolar.no/en/the-­expedition.html. See the expedition’s homepage http://sorpolen2011.npolar.no/en/ and its Facebook page https://www. facebook.com/sorpolen. See also the account of the expedition written by Aasheim (2012). Personal communication from Jan-­Gunnar Winther, 5 March 2016. Solheim 2010. Fjellheim and Lieungh 2010. Andhøy 2013, 8–9. Andhøy 2006; 2008. Magnus and Ravndal 2011. Kippernes 2012. Andhøy 2014. New Zealand Defence Force 2011. Norsk Polarinstitutt 2011. NTB 2014. Krokfjord, Grønning, and Lofstad 2012. The presence of the undocumented expeditioner was reported at the time as being accidental – a product of Andhøy’s hasty departure from New Zealand – rather than deliberate. Chapman 2012.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 164

21/12/2016 10:11

Modern explorers  165 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

Hemmings 2011, 337–8. Malm, Skaug, and Bakkejord 2016. Strøm and Mehren 2016. See most notably Elzinga 1993. IAATO 2014. Dodds and Hemmings 2009. Lorentzen et al. 2012. Andhøy 2014. Andhøy 2014. Lévi-­Strauss quoted in Driver 2001, 1. Driver 2001, 1. Griffiths 2007, 334.

REFERENCES Aasheim, S.P. 2012. I Roald Amundsens skispor. Oslo: Cappelen Damm. Andhøy, J. 2006. Berserk til Valhall. Oslo: Flyt Forlag. Andhøy, J. 2008. Berserk gjennom Nordvestpassasjen. Oslo: Flyt Forlag. Andhøy, J. 2013. Berserk i Antarktis: den første reisen 1997–2001. Oslo: Flyt Forlag. Andhøy, J. 2014. Missing Brothers. Published 6 May on http://berserk.no/?p=343. Anonymous. 2013. The Expedition: What We Hope to Do. Published 2013 on http://www.thecoldestjourney. org/the-­expedition/. Bloom, L. 1993. Gender on Ice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Buchan, J. 1993. The latitude with attitude. The Independent, 14 February 1993. Retrieved at http://www.inde pendent.co.uk/news/uk/polar-­explorers-­regain-­strength-­in-­lap-­of-­tourist-­luxury-­sir-­ranulph-­fiennes-­and-­dr-­ michael-­stroud-­1472700.html on 28 November 2014. Chapman, P. 2012. Repair man accidentally joins South Pole expedition. Daily Telegraph, 31 January 2012. Retrieved at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/antarctica/9050999/Repair-­man-­accidentally-­joins-­ South-­Pole-­expedition.html on 2 March 2016. Dodds, K. 1997. Geopolitics of Antarctica: Views from the Southern Ocean Rim. Chichester: John Wiley. Dodds, K. 2002. Pink Ice: Britain and the South Atlantic Empire. London: I.B. Tauris. Dodds, K. 2005. The great trek: New Zealand and the British/Commonwealth 1955–58 Trans-­Antarctic Expedition. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 33(1): 93–114. Dodds, K. and Hemmings, A. 2009. Frontier vigilantism? Australia and contemporary representations of the Australian Antarctic Territory. Australian Journal of Politics and History 55(4): 513–29. Drivenes, E.-­A. and Jølle, H.D. (eds). 2007. Into the Ice: The History of Norway and the Polar Regions. Oslo: Gyldendal. Driver, F. 2001. Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire. Oxford: Blackwell. Elzinga, A. 1993. Antarctica: the construction of a continent for and by science. Pages 73–106 in Crawford, E., Shinn, T. and Sörlin, S. (eds) Denationalizing Science: The Contexts of International Scientific Practice. Dordrecht: Klüwer. Fiennes, R. 1983. To the Ends of the Earth. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Fiennes, R. 2000. Beyond the Limits: The Lessons Learned from a Lifetime’s Adventures. London: Little Brown. Fiennes, R. 2003. Captain Scott. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Fiennes, R. 2007. Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: The Autobiography. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Fjellheim, S. and Lieungh, E. 2010. Feil å bruke skattepenger på gutteturer. Published on nrk.no 27 February 2010. Accessed at http://www.nrk.no/troms/kritiserer-­sorpol-­ekspedisjon-­1.7355773. Francis, M. 2007. A flight from commitment? Domesticity, adventure and the masculine imaginary in Britain after the Second World War. Gender and History 19: 163–85. Goksøyr, M. 2004. Kappløp i gamle spor. In Drivenes, E.-­A. and Jølle, H.D. (eds), Norsk polarhistorie 1: ­ekspedisjonene. Oslo: Gyldendal. Griffiths, T. 2007. Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Hanbury-­Tenison, R. 2010. The Great Explorers. London: Thames & Hudson. Hemmings, A.D. 2011. The Antarctic Treaty System [online]. New Zealand Yearbook of International Law 9: 335–40. Availability: ISSN: 1176–6417. Herbert, W. 1963. In Amundsen’s tracks on the Axel Heiberg Glacier. Geographical Journal 129(4): 397–411. Huntford, R. 1979. Scott and Amundsen. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 165

21/12/2016 10:11

166  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica IAATO (International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators) 2014. IAATO Commends Norwegian Court for Convicting Violator of Antarctic Treaty. Published 18 July 2014 on http://en.mercopress.com/2014/07/18/ iaato-­commends-­norwegian-­court-­for-­convicting-­violator-­of-­antarctic-­treaty. Jones, M. 2003. The Last Great Quest: Captain Scott’s Antarctic Sacrifice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, M. 2014. ‘The truth about Captain Scott’: The Last Place on Earth, debunking, sexuality and decline in the 1980s. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42(5): 857–81. Kagge, E. 2006. Philosophy for Polar Explorers: What they don’t Teach you in School. London: Pushkin Press. Kippernes, G.A. 2012. Leder på forskningsstation kritisk ekspedision – kan ikke nekte Andhøy å hente utstyret sitt. Published on vg.no 26 January 2012. Accessed at http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/ kan-­ikke-­nekte-­andhoey-­aa-­hente-­utstyret-­sitt/a/10076811/. Kirwan, L. 1964. The RGS and British exploration: a review of recent trends. Geographical Journal 130(2): 221–5. Krokfjord, T.R., Grønning, T., and Lofstad, R. 2012. Umulig å gjemme seg når man seiler med piratflagg. Published 3 April 2012 on http://www.dagbladet.no/2012/04/03/nyheter/utenriks/jarle_andhoy/berserk/ chile/20973260/. Launius, R. 2010. Toward the poles: a historiography of scientific exploration during the International Polar Years and the International Geophysical Year. Pages 47–81 in Launius, R., Fleming, J. and DeVorkin, D. (eds), Globalising Polar Science. London: Palgrave. Lorentzen, T., Alver, E., Aftret, B., Korneliussen, R., Frøytlog, B., Opedal, H. and Bergesen, M. 2012. I hardt vær. Published 3 February 2012 in Dag Bladet. Accessed via http://www.dagbladet.no/2012/02/03/magasinet/ jarle_andhoy/ekspedisjoner/ulykker/20064843/?www=1. Magnus, J. and Ravndal, D. 2011. Jarle Andhøy svarer – kritikken mot ‘Berserk’ er sprøyt. Published 28  February 2011 on vg.no. Accessed via http://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/jarle-­andhoey-­svarer-­kritikken-­ mot-­berserk-­er-­sproeyt/a/10082384/. Malm, M.S., Skaug, T.R., and Bakkejord, M. 2016. Jeg behandles som ‘terroristen’ i Antarktis. 18 February 2016. Accessed via http://www.kjendis.no/2016/02/17/kjendis/jarle_andhoy/berserk/antarktis/jarle_andh/43194780/. Mear, R. and Swan, R. 1987. In the Footsteps of Scott. London: Jonathan Cape. New Zealand Defence Force 2011. A Test for Navy’s Newest Ship. Published on 1 March 2011. http://nzdf.mil. nz/news/media-­releases/2011/20110301-­atfnns.htm. Norsk Polarinstitutt 2011. Anmeldelse etter miljøforskriften for Antarktis. Published 3 March 2011 on http:// www.npolar.no/no/nyheter/2011/2011-­03-­03-­anmeldelse-­miljoforskriften-­antarktis.html. NTB (Norsk Telegrambyrå) 2014. Andhøy går til motangrepp på polarinstitutt i lagmannsretten. Published 4 November 2014 on http://www.nrk.no/troms/andhoy-­gar-­til-­motangrep-­pa-­polarinstituttet-­i-­lagmannsretten-­1.12024822. Riffenburgh, B. 1993. The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism, and Geographical Discovery. London: Belhaven. Roberts, P. 2011a. The European Antarctic: Science and Strategy in Scandinavia and the British Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Roberts, P. 2011b. Heroes for the past and present: a century of remembering Scott and Amundsen. Endeavour 35(4): 142–50. Roberts, D. 2014. Opinion: Rescued Antarctic group aren’t heroes. Published on nationalgeographic.com on 9 January 2014. Accessed at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/01/140108-­ antarctica-­ ship-­ ice­trapped-­rescue-­history-­science/. Robinson, M. 2006. The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Siddique, H. 2013. Sir Ranulph Fiennes ‘very frustrated’ after returning from Antarctic trek. Published on theguardian.com on 4 March 2013. Accessed at http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/mar/04/ frostbite-­sir-­ranulph-­fiennes-­antarctic Solheim, C. 2010. Winther får ekspedisjonskritikk. iTromsø, 27 October 2010. Accessed at http://www.itromso. no/nyheter/article400758.ece on 27 September 2016. Spirit of Mawson, 2016. Celebrating Mawson. Accessed at http://www.spiritofmawson.com/celebrating-­mawson/. Strøm, P. and Mehren, E. 2016. Jarle Andhøy er frifunnet. Published 25 February 2016 at http://www.nrk.no/ troms/jarle-­andhoy-­er-­frifunnet-­1.12820950. Retrieved on 2 March 2016. Thomson, D. 1977. Scott’s Men. London: Allen Lane.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 166

21/12/2016 10:11

11.  Life, ice and ocean: contemporary Antarctic spaces Alessandro Antonello

Although ‘The Antarctic’ is certainly one (very) big space, it is also a region composed of many spaces. These abut, overlap, compete, inter-­connect, are separate and ­distinct, formal or informal, temporary or permanent, strictly or loosely bounded. The Antarctic and Southern Ocean region is not a ‘homogenous wilderness – majestic and wild and entirely uniform’, but, as Christy Collis has argued, ‘a complex cultural space’.1 Conceptions and treatments of Antarctica as a totality or whole are historically and g­ eographically specific, products of the imperialist visions of, successively, the British in the 1920s and 1930s and the Americans and Soviets in the early Cold War.2 In disaggregating and disassembling the larger Antarctic space into smaller parts (which do not necessarily add up to one coherent whole), we can see how Antarctic politics operates at several geographical scales ranging from the intensely local to the global. It is a region in which complex and diverse environments sustain a multitude of human projects and activities that respond to and produce a variety of spaces. In this chapter I explore a range of Antarctic actors and their spaces. Several decades of critical scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, especially human geography, have embedded and reinforced the notion that spaces are not simply natural and neutral stages for human relations and actions. Rather more profoundly, humans spatialise the world in various ways and for many reasons; they create the spaces in which they act, and they are in turn shaped by those spaces.3 These spatial processes are fundamentally geo-­political, because they are tied to questions of power and influence, access, rights and obligations among actors. For Antarctica, it is not simply a formal and high politics, based only in the structures of the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS), but also personal and informal, in the realms of international and domestic civil society, within scientific disciplines and institutions and within and between human and non-­human bodies. This geo-­politics need not be seen as simply dominance of the whole Antarctic, including exclusive and all-­encompassing rights to access and exploitation, but more subtle forms of power and influence over specific bodies, places, concepts and ideas at various scales. There are several considerable elements of space. The first is materiality. This has two senses, one relating to the materiality of the space itself and the second to the material practices that actors have in relation to a space. When considering Antarctic spaces, one must keep in mind the things that exist there, from the dominating ice in its various forms, to rock and ocean, to wildlife and fisheries and all of their organic relationships; one also needs to keep in mind the human-­built environment, including the scientific stations, infrastructures and instruments imposed upon the landscape, which allow continued human presence and impact ecosystems. Humans have relationships with particular objects and things, in particular configurations. The second sense of materiality relates to the material practices and performances that human and non-­human actors have in relation to 167

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 167

21/12/2016 10:11

168  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica the material Antarctic. This is a wide array of performances and practices, and includes, among many other things, ship and airplane transport, scientific stations, the technologies of sovereignty such as flags and plaques and the multitude of scientific research practices and instruments. These practices may be (precariously) emplaced – think of buildings or planted flags – or mobile and fluid – think of the seismic traverses of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) or the man-­hauling of sledges in the Heroic Age. Intimately connected with these material practices and elements are representations and discourse. Spaces are created not only through material engagements but also through representations. State practices and representations have been intensely interrogated by scholars of critical geopolitics, who see international politics as being profoundly discursive, in that actors spatialise international politics, representing it ‘as a “world” characterised by particular types of places, peoples and dramas’.4 The power of vision, the capacity to see and define the field of vision, is central in making spaces, people and things legible and is an essential element of power.5 The meanings articulated in these representations structure expectations and relationships among actors, enabling and restraining certain legitimate or illegitimate actions and thoughts. The particular words used to describe Antarctic spaces inscribe them with meaning – think of some of the keywords of Antarctica: wilderness, barren, untouched, pristine, international, words which speak to ‘firsts’ and ‘exceptionality’, or which speak of connections to the past or the future; some states have discourses of proximity and geological connection. There are many texts that articulate Antarctic spaces, whether maps, the international legal documents of the ATS, scientific papers, reports and diagrams, diplomatic, official and policy documents, the various forms of mass media. Some elements of the Antarctic are privileged, mobilised and legitimated while others are marginalised and silenced. The temporal elements of space are also considerable. Spaces are not timeless, are susceptible to change (even termination), and each has a history that needs to be considered. Spaces also have temporalities: senses of past, present or future; a deployment of time in culture and politics. By preserving and celebrating Edwardian era huts in A ­ ntarctica – think of Scott, Shackleton and Mawson, among others – some states enrol long histories of exploration and research to legitimate contemporary programmes. By building and renovating old and new stations, announcing new programmes or agenda, states make claims of permanence and persistence into the future. The ways in which an action in the present might connect an actor to a storied and famed historic actor or presume a connection to potential future actors, are important aspects of space and must be considered. Any space we can recognise in Antarctica has been spatialised by an actor or group of actors. It is necessary to be mindful of which actors, individually or collectively, have created or sustained a particular space. While the formal politics of the ATS might suggest that state spatialisations are most important or consequential, states are not the only actors, and various spatialisations are not always transparent grabs for geopolitical power. A host of other actors have affective and consequential relationships with Antarctica: scientists, individually and institutionally, in state or private bodies, in polar-­focused institutions or more general universities; commercial enterprises and industries, including extractive fisheries and minerals concerns, service industries including tourism and those shipping lines that charter polar vessels; non-­governmental organisations, especially environmental activists and policy-­oriented think tanks; and any individual person around the world, those who live in an Antarctic state and those who do not, those who have

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 168

21/12/2016 10:11

Life, ice and ocean  169 been and those who have not been. Experiences differ markedly and there are different stakes at play with each of these players vis-­à-­vis any other actor. The spatial politics of Antarctica is also a politics in several directions: actors are not simply acting against or in relation to other Antarctic-­specific actors, but also politics in relation to domestic or metropolitan cultures and societies. This chapter can only give a limited account of Antarctic spatial politics, but it does aim to bring contemporary spatialities into view through some particular and significant experiences. First, it looks to the spaces of Antarctic life, by which I mean the spatialities of conservation and environmental protection. Second, it explores the materiality of ice, especially the contemporary space of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. And finally, it explores oceanic spaces, especially continental shelves and marine-­protected areas that are currently central to Antarctic affairs. This discussion is synoptic and suggestive rather than detailed and prescriptive; it does not delimit the spaces of Antarctic politics, but calls attention to the spaces and spatialities that currently constitute Antarctic politics. The overall picture I aim to depict is of Antarctic politics as including actors apart from the Treaty parties, as occurring in a constellation of spaces, at many scales and in relation to many objects and sites, large or small, connected or discrete. Each space has its own dynamics, and should not be seen as fully symmetrical, commensurable or even ­permanently engaged with the formal inter-­state politics of the ATS.

SPACES OF CONSERVATION, PROTECTION AND MANAGEMENT In the fifty-­year plus history of the Antarctic Treaty, perhaps the most consequential development has been the incremental emergence and creation of the regime of comprehensive environmental protection. Beginning in the early 1960s with the negotiation of the Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora (finalised in 1964), moving through the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals (CCAS, 1972), then Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) in 1980, and culminating with the rejection of Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities (CRAMRA) and the negotiation of the Madrid Protocol in 1991. When the original signatories negotiated the Antarctic Treaty at the end of the 1950s, conservation and environmental protection were not paramount concerns or even that deeply embedded in the Treaty.6 The system in place today, governed by the Madrid Protocol, has dynamically generated and regenerated Antarctic space and place. Through its system of specially protected and managed areas, the Committee for Environmental Protection (CEP) and the Protocol have brought an intense focus on Antarctic localities. There is a regular stream of scientific papers and ATCM submissions on the problem of effectively protecting the Antarctic environment. What exists is therefore a generalized space of environmental protection, as well as a collection of specific sites around the region, constituting something of an archipelago of (uneven) ‘protection’ and intervention, unified by the Madrid Protocol but nevertheless with specific local actors, politics, relationships, meanings and science. Within all this activity is a spatial politics, one generated by changing scientific and legal–political visions of biogeography, pressures of global environmental change, an ever-­increasing human presence in the region,7 and manifested

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 169

21/12/2016 10:11

170  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica through the choices required of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties (ATCPs) in pursuit of their treaty obligations. The spatial focus of this protection ethic has been the system of area protection and management. Specially protected areas were first instituted under the Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora (AMCAFF), and were re-­stated in the Madrid Protocol’s fifth annex. Their purpose is ‘to protect outstanding environmental, scientific, historic, aesthetic or wilderness values, any combination of those values, or ongoing or planned scientific research’ (Article 3, 1). The approach to the area protection and management system is highly concentrated on the ice-­free areas of the continent.8 Only 0.34 per cent of Antarctica is ice-­free, roughly 45,000 km2, and only about 6,000 km2 of that is within 5 km of the coast.9 The collective decision within the CEP and ATCM about which areas to designate as protected or managed can affect a wide range of human activities in a limited range of areas – parties, old and new, continue to build new scientific stations, increasing tourist numbers bring increased impacts, scientists want to preserve areas untouched, or minimally impacted, for future research. Making those decisions is, in part, an important element of Antarctic politics, engaging the states parties as central actors, but also centrally involving scientists, not limited to the ecologists and conservation biologists, non-­state actors including tour companies and environmental activists. The efforts to institute this spatial protection have not been equally born by all the ATCPs. Between 1966 and 2011, five consultative parties proposed 78.9 per cent of protected areas – one factor here is the fact that membership has expanded, and older parties have a longer history in the matter, but newer parties, such as China and India, have become more active recently.10 Those same parties – Australia, Chile, New Zealand, UK and USA – have also been the highest paper contributors to the CEP.11 The processes for environmental protection have become sites for contestation over the character and meaning of Antarctic space. A recent case in this regard has been the experience of the Larsemann Hills. Located in East Antarctica, the Larsemann Hills is an ice-­free area of about 40 km2 of peninsulas and near-­shore islands, and is the southernmost coastal ‘oasis’ in East Antarctica. First charted by the Norwegian Lars Christensen in 1935, they only began to experience ‘significant or sustained’ human activity in the 1980s, when, between 1986 and 1989, four research stations were built by Australia, China and the Soviet Union.12 Owing to its exploration history, its features are predominantly named with Australian and Norwegian place-­names. The story of the Larsemann Hills ASMA (Antarctic Specially Managed Area) shows the geopolitical dynamics at play. At the 2006 Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting (ATCM), India announced that it planned to build a new research station, its third, in the area. Problematically, and to the evident displeasure of Australia, China, Romania and Russia, this India station would be built in the middle of a proposed ASMA, which was on the agenda at that very meeting to be approved – it had been in development since at least 1999. What made the Indian proposal so fascinating was that it disrupted a Treaty process and associated rituals with, in anthropologist Jessica O’Reilly’s articulation, ‘tectonic history’ and ‘tectonic time’, ‘Gondwanan geopolitics’ and ‘sacred geographies’. India hoped to build its station there as it was at that point that the Indian subcontinent and Antarctica had been connected 125 million years ago.13 O’Reilly has argued that the ASMA process ‘forces a contingent of several nationalities to turn a seemingly blank Antarctic space into a decidedly international, managed one’. The ‘involved parties

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 170

21/12/2016 10:11

Life, ice and ocean  171 negotiate procedures and regulations for how to live in, develop, study, visit and categorize a piece of Antarctic land’.14 Another development in Antarctic spatialisation has been the efforts in the last decade to make the protection of Antarctic areas more systematic. Article 3(2) of Annex V to the Madrid Protocol states that the parties should identify areas for protection and management through ‘a systematic environmental-­geographic framework’. The Annex does not define this framework, and so parties have had to define it progressively. Although attempts at biogeographical specificity are not new, their incorporation into the realm of Antarctic politics has occurred since the ratification of the Madrid Protocol in 1998. New Zealand in particular took some initiative in defining this framework. A research group there attempted to define a range of Antarctic environments through data derived from the physical environment. The complex and detailed task identified 400 environments, which were consolidated into twenty-­one environments for managerial purposes.15 This Environmental Domains Analysis framework was adopted at the thirty-­first ATCM in 2008 for use in identifying areas of protection and management.16 This approach was further refined in the years following by considering biodiversity data, and pursuing categories based on bioregions. This analysis found fifteen biologically distinct, ice-­free regions that were labelled Antarctic Conservation Biogeographic Regions.17 These newly codified and enacted biogeographies might not seem political, but they spatialise Antarctica in certain ways, unsettling old dispositions of ‘the environment’ and creating new opportunities for authority and control. A variety of pressures have caused certain actors – especially the English-­speaking parties – to pursue this agenda with some alacrity. And the fact that Russia has made its views on these matters specific – not with opposition, but with a counter-­narrative of Russian priority.18 These developments in approaches are suggestive of how dynamic and finer-­grained scientific approaches to the Antarctic space are becoming. The scientific efforts, mediated through the ATCM, bring into diplomatic negotiation what Antarctica is made of, and therefore what is considerable by the ATCMs. The scientific ground continues to shift beneath the feet of the ATCPs. The various scientific disciplines refine and change their spatialisations of Antarctica, generating new pressures and meanings. The system of area protection and management demands choices about which spaces to protect explicitly and which to leave only under the general protection of the Madrid Protocol. And choices, quite simply, are political. Whether the parties pursue a systematic and comprehensive area protection, or whether they choose only representative examples, is political. This is to say nothing of how robust or weak these protections are. The simple act of designation enrols these Antarctic spaces into powerful worlds of representation and discourse. The differentiated emphasis among the parties on delimiting and enacting protected and managed areas has renewed older elements of environmental politics in Antarctica. Environmental protection is a central element in the identity of Antarctic actors today, both individually and collectively, and continues a long relationship of ­‘environmental authority’ with the region. Adrian Howkins has argued that ‘­ environmental authority’ was a fundamental part of Britain’s relationship with the Antarctic Peninsula and sub-­Antarctic islands in the South Atlantic in the 1940s and 1950s, especially as an ideology that enrolled the natural world, especially the controlled and wise use of whales, into justifications of imperialism against Argentina and Chile.19 The exercise of authority and scientific expertise today through the CEP in the ­designation of protected areas

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 171

21/12/2016 10:11

172  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica or biogeographic regioning of the continent at once manifests political desires as well as ecological sensibilities. With protected and managed areas are some of the important elements of space and spatiality in contemporary Antarctica. Materially, the changing and refined scientific understandings of Antarctic biology and ecology have precipitated a new vision of the spaces of Antarctic life. These new interpretations have in turn generated pressures to change patterns of human engagements. It is in the responses through the CEP and ATCM that we can read the politics, as parties with different intensities and meanings commit to increased protections, or lead the way with research and policy. Discursively, these spaces and meanings further embed the environment into Antarctic politics, making commitments to them hallmarks of good or bad Antarctic policy and action among the parties, setting up potential alienation from the system in the future, and generating questions about robustness and resilience. Indeed, the parties’ engagement with the system suggests weak and strong registers regarding protected spaces. The politics of choosing a system of protection that is either representative or comprehensive is also fundamental here, choices about what to leave, or even recognise, as wilderness and inviolate areas. The legibility of these spaces also creates political imperatives, foreshadowing yet further refinements, intrusions and perhaps even pathologies. And the temporalities of these refined spaces of conservation, engage both deep time and the future. As India tried to enrol the deep time of Gondwanaland and plate tectonics into Antarctic politics to justify their actions in the region and create a platform for their ongoing place and potential leadership in the ATS, so do other actors enrol the future into Antarctic spaces, whether through spectres of environmental destruction and violation or through research that uses the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) year 2100 as a mark of potential change. The spatiliaties of Antarctic protection and management are subtle, but profound.

SPACES OF ICE Ice undoubtedly dominates and defines Antarctica. In one of the most eloquent, searching and influential works of Antarctic writing the historian Stephen J. Pyne saw ‘The Ice’, a massive entity that took everything from humans rather than giving anything. Pyne celebrated its ‘preternatural emptiness’, suggesting that it might be the ‘greatest of its natural resources’.20 Pyne did see the various manifestations and aspects of ‘The Ice’ – the icebergs, glaciers, ice shelves, sea ice and ice sheets – but chose to emphasise its unity and totality. When it came to human interaction with the ice, he suggested that the “[t]he reductionism of The Ice had . . . imposed, by its enormous singularity, a geopolitical unity”.21 The ice here is an actor in its own right, which shapes human actions and ideas. It is, though, a problematic statement because it underplays the diverse nature of ice itself. There is a politics of the ice, and in contemporary Antarctica it is fundamentally tied to climate change and melting. Though ice has always been dynamic, its contemporary changes are disturbingly rapid and will profoundly affect human society. In the years since Pyne’s 1986 book, Antarctica’s ice has increasingly been disaggregated and treated in its different manifestations, and also regionally. Greater scientific understanding of the ice has led to an appreciation of its dynamism and material difference across the region.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 172

21/12/2016 10:11

Life, ice and ocean  173 For one thing, climate change has had a differentiated impact across Antarctica, with the Antarctic Peninsula warming rapidly, parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) now, it has been argued, in terminal disintegration, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet with less obvious effects from warming, and Antarctic sea ice recording its highest winter extents. Antarctica is melting, ‘but not in the way we anticipated’, as the glaciologist Eric Rignot has put it.22 And of course, it is Antarctic ice (along with other global ice) that records historic climates, so as it is affected by warming it provides humanity with crucial evidence to help us think about climate change. Changing technologies have allowed different views of the ice as well. Remote sensing technologies have been central here, with the rise of comprehensive satellite coverage, and a comprehensive range of measurements. Glaciologists and geophysicists now see a highly variable and differentiated mass of ­terrestrial and maritime ice in Antarctica. The spaces of Antarctic ice should also be seen as political and not simply natural areas of scientific research. Ice challenges existing ideas and concepts of international law and politics, and challenges conceptions of territorial sovereignty: ice hides terra firma, making the drawing of coastal baselines difficult or impossible; sea ice can persist for years at a time, acting like terra firma; ice shelves, even longer lived, similarly problematise our clear-­cut notions of land and territory.23 When the territorial claims were made in the first half of the twentieth century, although they encompassed the ice, explorers favoured rock to plant their flags, seeing ice as unstable and uncertain ground on which to initiate sovereignty. The dynamism of ice, now coupled with fundamental instability arising from global climate change, makes an unstable political and material space. The WAIS has become a fascinating space of Antarctic politics and science. In a rapidly warming world, the WAIS has become a site of attention for the melting Antarctic and a future of higher sea levels. In 2014 alone two leading research groups published papers arguing that the retreat and collapse of glaciers draining into the Amundsen Sea has already begun.24 There has been a long link between the WAIS and climate change, with the glaciologist J.H. Mercer’s famous 1978 article on the subject directly and ominously linking increased carbon emissions with WAIS disintegration.25 The WAIS has distinct spatialities, associated with the politics of knowledge, authority and temporality. The example of the WAIS, moreover, suggests actors apart from the states party to the Antarctic Treaty: in this case, it is scientists, non-­governmental organizations, environmental activists, scholars and connections with other international regimes that create this particular Antarctic space, its range of meanings and potentials. The WAIS also suggests a politics that goes beyond the formal institutions of the ATS. It is a central element in the global politics of climate change, the projection of climate futures and potential (inevitable) global sea level change. Jessica O’Reilly, Naomi Oreskes and Michael Oppenheimer have traced the politics of the WAIS in climate change science and policy. They asked why the scientific consensus on the potential collapse of the WAIS articulated in the third IPCC assessment was not also in the fourth IPCC assessment. Though they did not explicitly address questions of spatiality, the subject is inherently spatial. O’Reilly, Oreskes and Oppenheimer demonstrate how perceiving and apprehending the space of WAIS has experienced great changes. Before satellite remote sensing and imagery, ‘it was difficult to “know” the ice sheet in its entirety’; the advent of satellite images in the 1990s suggested that scientists ‘were looking in the wrong place’, as it was seen that ‘rapid changes were occurring in the Amundsen Sea

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 173

21/12/2016 10:11

174  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica area, where no nation had permanent bases’.26 In fact, the WAIS space is one that states have been partially blind to because it is both covered in part by three territorial claims and also avoided because it forms a significant part of the Pacific Ocean ‘unclaimed’ sector – with no political impetus to establish bases, the Amundsen Sea has been avoided. What emerges is a space built through a search for knowledge, contention over certainty and uncertainty of data and projections, ideas about stability and instability, sovereign ‘hot-­spots’ and ‘cold-­spots’, and the creation and maintenance of scientific reputations, careers and relationships internationally. The Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC) has also mobilized the WAIS in its environmental advocacy within the ATS. With Jessica O’Reilly as lead author, ASOC information papers have urged the consultative parties to see the WAIS. The papers convey the scientific literature, depicting the sheet as experiencing and facing ‘rapid’ changes, exploring the ‘tipping points’ for its collapse, noting the uncertainty of knowledge and projections and urging specific actions on the part of the ATCPs, including increased support for observation and recording of changes, the establishment of early detection systems for local disintegrations and increased support for WAIS science.27 The tenor of the ASOC information papers is also fundamentally global, invoking the projected 3 to 3.6-­metre sea level rise that a disintegration of the WAIS might lead to, and calling on ATCPs to think outside of their exclusive system. ASOC is spatialising Antarctica in different ways to change the direction of politics; the WAIS has become both a subject and an object of political intervention. The WAIS and its geo-­history since the 1970s is inherently global, tied to climate change, melting and dynamism, and has been spatialised by non-­state actors and deployed into the inter-­state politics of the ATS. Another important element of the WAIS space is the temporalities associated with it. Attention to WAIS as a separate entity has existed for some time, increasing especially since the 1970s. It is not simply about the past, for conceptions of the WAIS space, its dynamism and structures, also have futurity. The rapidity of collapse – which in scientific terms means over the next century or more – gives a time scale to potential politics. The WAIS example illuminates some of the issues of spatiality in contemporary Antarctica. The point here is not that WAIS is the focal point of Antarctic politics, over which there have been or are high diplomatic contests. Rather, the point is that in subtle and incremental ways, there are longer-­term politics of knowledge and ‘environmental authority’ in relation to Antarctic spaces that, while clearly being real and material objects, generate particular dispositions and relationships, problems and representations, which open up or foreclose avenues for development and change. In addition to the WAIS, similar issues could be explored in relation to the space of sea ice, which has experienced a small increase in maximum winter-­time extent during the period of the satellite instrumental record, or the sub-­glacial realm beneath the ice sheets, the progressive exploration of which over the past few decades has revealed a substantial system of sub-­glacial lakes and rivers. In the 1970s the (eventually unfulfilled) potential for harvesting icebergs to bring fresh water to drier parts of the world foreshadowed new actors in the ATS, and new meanings for Antarctic ice. More recently, there has been competition between nations to drill the longest ice core – exceeding 1 million years – to reveal paleo-­climatic data. Some of these have been part of formal Antarctic politics, and some not, but may yet become more explicit parts of the conversation, having to deal with the science and policy

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 174

21/12/2016 10:11

Life, ice and ocean  175 of climate change, challenges to patterns of mobilities, or new international and global relationships of actors and ideas. As it stands, the spatialities of Antarctic ice, although not explicitly tied to territorial claims or formally apparent in ATCMs, have implications for knowledge and politics.

OCEAN SPACES Antarctica’s ocean spaces have a more than two-­century long history of human engagement and contestation. Flowing around the continent, the tempestuous yet fertile Southern Ocean has a central position in Antarctic geo-­history, the site of the (over) exploitation of seals and whales in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the conduit of and for explorers and scientists, a field of scientific research, and more recently the site of contention over fishing, future potentialities for minerals and oil and a continuing face-­off over ‘scientific whaling’. As with the continent, the Southern Ocean is not simply one big and singular space, but has a range of constituent and smaller spaces within it, a range of visions and approaches. Moreover, it is not simply a two-­dimensional watery plane, but a complex physical volume containing a bio-­massive, if relatively simple, ecosystem, currents and water masses, seabed and earth below that still. In the nineteenth century American sealers bloodied the foreshores and beaches of sub-­and peri-­Antarctic islands, forcing the fur seal near extinction. They were followed from the late nineteenth century by British and Norwegian whaling interests, aided by technological development, to harvest and process whales through a network of whaling stations. Joined by other states in the inter-­war years, it was the Soviets and Norwegians from the 1950s who persisted in whaling. The human relationship with the Southern Ocean has not simply been exploitative, but also scientific: British scientists pioneered oceanographic study, hand-­in-­glove with the whaling industry, in the inter-­war years with the Discovery Investigations.28 American and Soviet science in the early Cold War also, spurred by geopolitical and strategic concerns, shaped our understanding of the Southern Ocean. All of these activities left ships’ tracks on maps, covering the great scope of the Ocean, plumbing its depths for information and for marine mammal resources. The Antarctic Treaty does not cover the high seas. Article VI excluded them principally because the US advocated – in the context of the late 1950s and the Geneva conferences on the Law of the Sea in 1958 – that there should be freedom of navigation on the high seas around the world.29 Yet, developments, real and potential, in the commercial realm in the Southern Ocean during the 1960s made the exclusion of the high seas a source of instability for Treaty politics. The parties saw the potentially resurgent sealing industry and then the new developments in krill and other fisheries during the 1960s and 1970s, and responded by negotiating new treaty instruments, including the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctica Seals (1972) and CCAMLR (1980). CCAMLR was negotiated to give some order to the developing krill fisheries’ exploitation of the Southern Ocean in the context of the development of an ethic of conservation at the ecosystem level and the continuing problematic of sovereignty in Antarctica. Continental shelves and exclusive economic zones (EEZs) have been important spaces of Antarctic politics since the negotiation and signing of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) between 1973 and 1982. Under Article 76 of UNCLOS,

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 175

21/12/2016 10:11

176  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica states with coastlines can exercise sovereign rights over the extended continental shelf appurtenant to their territory in relation to natural resources. What has made the issue pressing in the last decade is that UNCLOS requires states to specify their claims to the outer continental shelf by submitting them to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf within ten years of ratifying the convention.30 It, nevertheless, does have a longer history, and has been a tension within Antarctic politics since the negotiations for UNCLOS in the 1970s prepared the way for codification of rights regarding territorial seas, extended continental shelves and EEZs. The contest arises principally because of the long-­standing disagreements over territorial sovereignty in Antarctica. The seven claimant states hold that Article IV of the Treaty, negotiated before the codification of international law on continental shelves, does not preclude them, as coastal states, from claiming continental shelves. The non-­claimants oppose this both because they never recognized the claims in the first place and because there is a sense that claims to continental shelves are against the letter and spirit of Article IV which prevents the enlargement of claims.31 Several scholars have explored the range of practices and repertoires by which Antarctica’s continental shelves have been brought into national territorial orbits, investigated by science and contested. Continental shelves have been the principal sites of ‘ceremonies of possession’ in spite of the Treaty’s Article IV, central to the continued life of sovereignty discourses. Continental shelves, as Klaus Dodds has explored, are deployed in political rhetoric and performances in relation to them have become prominent in the last decade. The maps depicting continental shelves, Dodds suggests, embody ‘an explicit imperative to explore and exploit’.32 Government ministers of claimant states can stand in front of maps and gesture towards newly codified or confirmed areas of continental shelf, explicitly invoking future wealth, implicitly invoking long histories of connection and (attempted) control.33 These actions take part in long histories of imperialism, of ‘filling the blank spaces’, and suggest that the colonization of Antarctica has never ended. These performances address a range of audiences, domestic and international. To the domestic sphere, they reassure of the continuing and future wealth of the nation, while internationally they attempt to ward off rapacious outsiders – what Dodds and Alan Hemmings have labelled in the Australian case, ‘frontier vigilantism’.34 Australia has led the way in delimiting and claiming a continental shelf appurtenant to its claimed Antarctic territory.35 Though, in the delicate dance of Antarctic politics, it submitted Antarctic data to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, but requested they not be considered.36 Mapping continental shelves is a significant undertaking, demanding extensive geological and geophysical data collection, ­interpretation and collation – Australia, for one, spent around AUD$30 million on collecting data.37 In the policy-­making circles in Australia, the continental shelf is explicitly a space of resource potential and exploitation. When, in 2008, the CLCS had confirmed Australia’s maritime boundaries (which excluded Antarctica, though the maps depicted it), Australia’s then resource minister Martin Ferguson referred to the potential ‘bonanza’ and ‘unknown capacity’ of resources, prefiguring potential (domestic) regimes to ­encourage exploration.38 If they are contested spaces, at least for the moment commercial activity in relation to them is low, leaving the issue quiescent, even as there is a range of legal interpretation and diplomatic activity in relation to them.39 Yet seeing continental shelves as particular

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 176

21/12/2016 10:11

Life, ice and ocean  177 spaces of Antarctic politics again highlights the range of elements of spatiality: their materiality is what tempts extractive interests but also, for the time being, prevents any exploitation; representations and discourse in relation to the shelves sustains some of the oldest political and diplomatic tensions over territorial sovereignty and rights; they emphasize the particular and regionalized ways some Antarctic actors still approach the region; and continental shelves have a sense of futurity about them, as, without a viable industry in the present, the stakes and benefits are in the future, which encourages both claimant and non-­claimant alike to consider what they might do to anticipate and shape various futures – possibly exploitative, possibly not. Another significant contested space in contemporary Antarctic politics is the marine protected area (MPA). Working CCAMLR, several states, scientific bodies and environmentalist organizations have been pushing for large areas of protection, including no-­take zones, while others have sought to keep areas open to fishing or generally opposed efforts to impose MPAs. CCAMLR has been discussing MPAs in some form since the late 1990s, with further impetus from the call for a representative global network of MPAs in the declaration of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development. In the past decade, CCAMLR has given great time to the issue with several workshops and various commitments, but there has only been established one high-­seas MPA off the South Orkney Islands in 2009, with significant, if still unresolved discussions, on large MPAs in the Ross Sea and across East Antarctica.40 A central element in the contest over these spaces is the fairly orthodox battle of pro-­ exploitation against pro-­conservation camps. The Southern Ocean has been an exploited ocean for two centuries. Since the 1970s that exploitation has been of fisheries, including krill, cod and toothfish. This tension was faced in the late 1970s when CCAMLR was negotiated to regulate the nascent and promising krill fishery: at that time, the parties were predominantly non-­fishing actors (though they had their fair share of exploitative histories in Antarctica), and their strong commitment to conservation – codified in the novel Article II conservation of the whole ecosystem – won out against the krill fishing states, with varying intensities, at the time limited to the Soviet Union, Poland, Japan and West Germany. In the thirty-­year history of CCAMLR, the balance of interests has become rather more even, with strong fishing pressures against conservation positions.41 So, while Australia, France and the European Union propose large swathes of protection off East Antarctica and the United States and New Zealand propose areas in the Ross Sea, Russia, China and Ukraine have opposed them. An explicit element of Russia’s ‘Strategy’ for the Antarctic is to ‘strengthen the economic capacity of Russia through the use of marine biological resources available in the Southern Ocean, and complex investigations of the Antarctic mineral, hydrocarbon and other natural resources’.42 Chinese Antarctic discourse is similarly suffused with talk of resource prospects, connected to a larger Chinese policy of securing resources around the world for economic growth.43 The conservation-­minded states have also been forcefully joined by ASOC and the Antarctic Ocean Alliance, an international coalition of environmental organizations. The Ross Sea has gained a central place in the MPA story. Environmentalists and concerned scientists have defined it as being among the least damaged or impacted regions of the world ocean, and have pushed for additional protected areas to the US/New Zealand proposals. Indeed, it has been characterized in the campaign as ‘The Last Ocean’.44 The protection campaign has characterized it by superlatives: it is the ‘most pristine’ or ‘least

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 177

21/12/2016 10:11

178  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica damaged’ stretch of ocean on earth;45 it is the ‘most productive’ part of the Southern Ocean; it is remote; it is home ‘for a broad and unusually abundant array of Antarctic species’; it is a potential future refuge for species enduring climate change, as the Ross Sea is predicted to be the last part of the Southern Ocean with year-­round sea ice; the campaign has also fleshed out the depths of the region, referring often to the richness of the benthic fauna, the way life inhabits the continental shelf and slope. History is also part of the campaign, with a deployment of the region’s exploration history beginning with James Clark Ross in the 1840s and a use of the scientific records provided by lengthy occupation by US and New Zealand Stations (and more recent stations). The campaign also conjures the spectre of past over-­hunting of whales, suggesting how the Ross Sea is a space haunted by loss.46 The ideas and representations of the Ross Sea in this campaign are complex, but they suggest how a specific Antarctic space is currently contested and negotiated through complex formal and informal politics. The variety of Antarctic actors enrol different material, discursive and temporal aspects of this space into their projects, and the resolution of this contest will shape the perceptions and management of the Southern Ocean for some time to come. These ocean spaces show the many approaches to the Antarctic today. Their straight lines and square shapes show the continuing importance of laws in spatialising, but the centrality of the current MPA debates shows how non-­state actors continue to have a power in the Antarctic, whether or not this eventuates in tough MPA standards. The range of issues embodied in these spaces is also considerable: in a material and spatial extent they are a mix of focussed and local as well as broad and regional scales, applying both to regions as well as individual species and stocks; representationally and discursively, there continues to be a contest over the legitimate terms and ideas, including biogeography, bioregions and biodiversity, representativeness, resources, ‘rational use’, exploitation, preserved or open, pristine or damaged; temporally, these ocean spaces enrol a variety of senses of past, present and future, whether validating or deploring long experiences of exploitation, or trying to deal with the future shaped either by climate change and resource demands in a hungry world. In short, the patchwork of spaces and the variety of spatial projects in the Southern Ocean demand a close watch, and a sensitivity to explicit and implicit political effects.

CONCLUSION Through the spaces of conservation and protection, of the ice, and of the elements of the ocean, we can appreciate the variety and extent of contemporary Antarctic politics. Furthermore, we can recognize that the spatial politics of Antarctica is not simply a geopolitics of the whole region, but is concerned with spaces and places at various scales, sites and bodies and with varying connections to one another. This is the case because the Antarctic sustains many political, scientific, cultural, economic, environmental and intellectual projects. The formal diplomacy of the Antarctic Treaty System, the institutions of Antarctic research, as well as the more informal realm of ideas and activism, all generate these overlapping spatial projects. What is at stake in the future with these competing or complementary spaces and spatial projects? We might identify three main issues or questions. First, how stable is

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 178

21/12/2016 10:11

Life, ice and ocean  179 the Antarctic order? The Antarctic Treaty was negotiated, in part, to prevent the region from becoming ‘the scene or object of international discord’, and one must assume that the parties still desire this. Judged by their own Treaty obligation, the parties have had some measure of success, but at the beginning of the twentieth-­first century, there is still clearly contestation and disagreement. The maintenance and creation of Antarctic spaces is one area of contest, and the implicit and explicit elements of this contest need to be recognized, and their implications for the stability of the Antarctic political order need to be thought through. The second issue or question is environmental. Though this chapter has problematized the spatialities of conservation and protection, there is nevertheless a need to recognize the actual and potential human impacts on Antarctic ecosystems. How can there be ­effective conservation, as so many conservation-­minded scientists and activists demand, while also allowing the inevitable and inexorable increase of human activities in the context of global environmental change? Furthermore, can there be an affective conservation, environmental sensibilities that are hopeful and generative rather than fearful, dread-­filled and disabling? Answers are difficult, but must take into account the divergent spatial projects that the diverse actors bring to the region. And third, we might attend to issues of representativeness and democracy. The Antarctic Treaty system has endured and survived several outside challenges to its legitimacy since the late 1950s. The attempts to bring Antarctic space within larger international bodies, fora and agenda has been motivated by ideals of North–South justice and decolonization, and have been responded to by the Treaty parties with greater openness but also a more emphatic statement of their own ‘special responsibilities’ (as articulated in several ATS texts). This is not simply a question of which states are being excluded from the system. It is also a question of how non-­state actors are more fully included into a diplomatic regime created by and maintained for territorial and sovereign states. How are non-­state actors’ spatialisations legitimated and recognised? Do contemporary spatialities open the Antarctic up to the world, or do they further entrench the self-­interests of the existing state parties? Those spatialisations especially relating to conservation and protection or climate change break down Antarctica’s exceptionalism, and forcefully bring norms of global justice and environmental sustainability into play. The ‘spatial turn’ of the humanities and social sciences over the past three decades has thoroughly called attention to the politics of making spaces and the way those spaces in turn affect human actions and relationships. In relation to the Antarctic, we cannot see these spaces as simply constructed in the past (perhaps very long ago), but also as continually created or renovated in the present – and into the future. And those spatial projects are not simply carried by states, but by a whole range of other actors. As the conservation and protection effort for the Antarctic proceeds, others spaces demand further consideration, perhaps the space of the ‘human footprint’ or the spaces that are said to be untouched, never visited by any human.47 There will be varying interpretations as to what this complex of Antarctic spaces either foreshadows or forecloses, and analysts and actors alike will have to be mindful of whether the rigidity or flexibility of these spaces will be productive or counter-­productive.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 179

21/12/2016 10:11

180  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

ACKNOWLEDGMENT This chapter is based upon work supported by the US National Science Foundation under grant #1253779.

NOTES   1.   2.   3.   4.   5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Collis 2004, 40. Beck 1986, 54; Guyer 1983, 268; Dodds 2010a, 158. Lefebvre 1991; Massey 2005; Harvey 2006. Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992, 192; see Müller 2012 for more recent coverage of discourse and critical geopolitics. Foucault 1977; Scott 1998. Antonello 2014. Chown et al. 2012. Shaw et al. 2014. Hughes, Pertierra and Walton 2013, 121. Hughes, Pertierra and Walton 2013, 124. Convey, Hughes and Tin 2012. Measure 15 (2014) – ATCM XXXVII – CEP XVII, Brasilia, Larsemann Hills, East Antarctica, Antarctic Specially Managed Area, Management Plan, 2014. O’Reilly 2011. O’Reilly 2011, 220. Morgan et al. 2007. Resolution 3. Terauds et al. 2012; Australia et al. 2012. Russia 2013. Howkins 2008. Pyne 1998, 377. Pyne 1998, 325. Rignot 2011, 329. Rothwell 1996, 262. Sumner 2014. Mercer 1978. O’Reilly, Oreskes and Oppenheimer 2012, 721. ASOC 2010a; 2013; 2014. Roberts 2011; Burnett 2012. Dodds 2002, 89. Elferink 2002; Kaye and Rothwell 2002. Vigni 2001. Dodds 2011, 231. Dodds 2010b. Dodds and Hemmings 2009. Jabour 2009, 429. Jabour 2006. Jabour 2006, 198. Dodds 2010b, 283. Weber 2012. Brooks 2013, 280–81. Brooks 2013, 288. Russia 2011. Brady 2013, 42–3. See the website of the New Zealand-­based Last Ocean Charitable Trust http://www.lastocean.org/. Halpern et al. 2008. ASOC 2008; ASOC 2009; ASOC 2010b. Summerson 2012; Hughes et al. 2011.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 180

21/12/2016 10:11

Life, ice and ocean  181

REFERENCES Antonello, A. 2014. Nature conservation and Antarctic diplomacy, 1959–1964. The Polar Journal 4(2): 335–53. ASOC. 2008. The Ross Sea: A Candidate for Immediate Inclusion in a Network of Marine Protected Areas. CCAMLR – XXVII/BG xx. ASOC. 2009. The Case for Special Protection of the Ross Sea. CCAMLR – XXVIII/BG/28. ASOC. 2010a. The Future of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet: Observed and Predicted Changes, Tipping Points, and Policy Consideration. Information Paper 7. Antarctic Treaty Meeting of Expert on Climate Change, Svolvær. ASOC. 2010b. The Case for including the Ross Sea Continental Shelf and Slop in A Southern Ocean Network of Marine Protected Areas. CCAMLR-­XXIX/BG/26. ASOC. 2013. Update: The Future of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Information Paper 69. Thirty-­sixth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Brussels. ASOC. 2014. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet in the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): A Key Threat, A Key Uncertainty. Information Paper 74. Thirty-­seventh Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Brasilia. Australia, New Zealand and SCAR. 2012. Antarctic Conservation Biogeographic Regions. Working Paper 23 rev. 1. Thirty-­fifth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Hobart. Beck, P.J. 1986. The International Politics of Antarctica. London: Croom Helm. Brady, A.-­M. 2013. China’s Antarctic interests. Pages 31–49 in Brady, A.-­M. (ed.) The Emerging Politics of Antarctica. Abingdon: Routledge. Brooks, C.M. 2013. Competing values on the Antarctic high seas: CCAMLR and the challenge of marine-­ protected areas. The Polar Journal 3(2): 277–300. Burnett, D.G. 2012. The Sounding of the Whale: Science & Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chown, S.L., Lee, J.E., Hughes, K.A., Barnes, J., Barrett, P.J., Bergstrom, D.M., Convey, P., Cowan, D.A., Crosbie, K., Dyer, G., Frenot, Y., Grant, S.M., Herr, D., Kennicutt, M.C., Lamers, M., Murray, A., Possingham, H.P., Reid, K., Riddle, M.J., Ryan, P.G., Sanson, L., Shaw, J.D., Sparrow, M.D., Summerhayes, C., Terauds, A. and Wall, D.H. 2012. Challenges to the Future Conservation of the Antarctic. Science 337(6091): 158–9. Collis, C. 2004. The Proclamation Island moment: making Antarctica Australia. Law Text Culture 8: 39–56. Convey, P., Hughes, K. and Tin, T. 2012. Continental governance and environmental management mechanisms under the Antarctic Treaty System: sufficient for the biodiversity challenges of this century? Biodiversity 13(3–4): 234–48. Dodds, K. 2002. Pink Ice: Britain and the South Atlantic Empire. London: I.B. Tauris. Dodds, K. 2010a. Assault on the unknown: geopolitics, Antarctic science, and the International Geophysical Year (1957–8). Pages 148–72 in Naylor, S. and Ryan, J. (eds), New Spaces of Exploration: Geographies of Discovery in the Twentieth Century. London: I.B. Tauris. Dodds, K. 2010b. Gesture and posture: pointing the finger and the mapping of outer continental shelves. Polar Record 46(3): 282–4. Dodds, K. 2011. Sovereignty watch: claimant states, resources, and territory in contemporary Antarctica. Polar Record 47(3): 231–43. Dodds, K. and Hemmings, A. 2009. Frontier vigilantism? Australia and contemporary representations of Australian Antarctic Territory. Australian Journal of Politics and History 55(4): 513–29. Elferink, A. 2002. The continental shelf of Antarctica: Implications of the requirement to make a submission to the CLCS under Article 76 of the LOS Convention. International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law 17(4): 485–520. Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. Guyer, R. 1983. Antarctica’s role in international relations. Pages 267–79 in Orrego Vicuna, F. (ed.), Antarctic Resources Policy: Scientific, Legal and Political Issues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halpern, B.S., Walbridge, S., Selkoe, K., Kappel, C., Micheli, F., D’Agrosa, C., Bruno, J. et al. 2008. A global map of human impact on marine ecosystems. Science 319(5865): 948–52. Harvey, D. 2006. Space as a keyword. Pages 270–94 in Castree, N. and Gregory, D. (eds), David Harvey: A Critical Reader. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Howkins, A. 2008. Frozen empires: A history of the Antarctic sovereignty dispute between Britain, Argentina, and Chile, 1939–1959. PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin. Hughes, K., Fretwell, P., Rae, J., Holmes, K. and Fleming, A. 2011. Untouched Antarctica: Mapping a finite and diminishing environmental resource. Antarctic Science 23(6): 537–48. Hughes, K.A., Pertierra L.R. and Walton D.W.H. 2013. Area protection in Antarctica: How can conservation and scientific research goals be managed compatibly? Environmental Science & Policy 31: 120–32.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 181

21/12/2016 10:11

182  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Jabour, J. 2006. High latitude diplomacy: Australia’s Antarctic extended continental shelf. Marine Policy 30(2): 197–8. Jabour, J. 2009. The Australian continental shelf: Has Australia’s high-­latitude diplomacy paid off ? Marine Policy 33(2): 429–31. Kaye, S. and Rothwell, D.R. 2002. Southern ocean boundaries and maritime claims: Another Antarctic ­challenge for the law of the sea? Ocean Development & International Law 33: 359–89. Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-­Smith. Malden: Blackwell. Massey, D. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. Mercer, J.H. 1978. West Antarctic ice sheet and CO2 greenhouse effect: a threat of disaster. Nature 271: 321–5. Morgan, F., Barker, G., Briggs, C., Price, R. and Keys, H. 2007. Environmental Domains of Antarctica Verson 2.0 Final Report. Landcare Research New Zealand. Müller, M. 2012. Text, discourse, affect and things. Pages 49–68 in Dodds, K., Kuus, M. and Sharp, J. (eds), The Ashgate Companion to Critical Geopolitics. Farnham: Ashgate. O’Reilly, J. 2011. Tectonic history and Gondwanan geopolitics in the Larsemann Hills, Antarctica. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 34(2): 214–32. O’Reilly, J., Oreskes, N. and Oppenheimer, M. 2012. The rapid disintegration of projections: The West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Social Studies of Science 42(5): 709–31. Ó Tuathail, G. and Agnew, J. 1992. Geopolitics and discourse: Practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy. Political Geography 11(2): 190–204. Pyne, S.J. 1998. The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Rignot, E. 2011. Is Antarctica melting? Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 2(3): 324–31. Roberts, P. 2011. The European Antarctic: Science and Strategy in Scandinavia and the British Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rothwell, D.R. 1996. The Polar Regions and the Development of International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Russia. 2011. On strategy for the development of the Russian Federation activities in the Antarctic for the period until 2020 and longer-­term perspective. Working Paper 55. Thirty-­fourth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Buenos Aires. Russia. 2013. Russian Antarctic biogeographic regioning as compared to the New Zealand classification. Working Paper 22. Thirty-­sixth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Brussels. Scott, J.C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shaw, J.D., Terauds, A., Riddle, M., Possingham, H.P. and Chown. S.L. 2014. Antarctica’s protected areas are inadequate, unrepresentative, and at risk. PLoS Biology 12,6: e1001888. Summerson, R. 2012. Protection of Wilderness and Aesthetic Values in Antarctica. Pages 77–109 in Huettmann, F. (ed.), Protection of the Three Poles. Tokyo and Dordrecht: Springer. Sumner, T. 2014. No stopping the collapse of West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Science 344: 683. Terauds, A., Chown, S.L., Morgan, F., Peat, H.J., Watts, D.J., Keys, H., Convey, P. and Bergstrom, D.M. 2012. Conservation biogeography of the Antarctica. Diversity and Distributions 18(7): 726–41. Vigni, P. 2001. Antarctic maritime claims: ‘Frozen sovereignty’ and the law of the sea. Pages 85–104 in Elferink, A.G.O. and Rothwell, D.R. (eds), The Law of the Sea and Polar Maritime Delimitation and Jurisdiction. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Weber, M. 2012. Delimitation of the continental shelves in the Antarctic Treaty area. Pages 172–96 in Hemmings, A., Rothwell, D., and Scott, K. (eds), Antarctic Security in the Twenty-­First Century: Legal and policy perspectives. London and New York: Routledge.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 182

21/12/2016 10:11

12.  Selling the south: commercialisation and marketing of Antarctica Hanne Nielsen

In 1913 the Australian explorer Douglas Mawson penned a series of articles for The Adelie Blizzard, the ‘newspaper’ of his Australasian Antarctic Expedition, where he explicitly outlined ‘the economic value to be extracted from this continent’.1 The series, entitled ‘The Commercial Resources of Antarctica’, suggested possible economic activities including whaling, sealing,2 fox farming,3 wind power, ‘sanatoria, ice sports and sight seeing’.4 While no health camps have been established in Antarctica, and alien species are now prohibited from being introduced to the south,5 Mawson’s other predictions have all come true: marine mammals have been harvested, several annual marathons are held on the continent,6 wind turbines have been installed,7 and every year almost 40,000 tourists flock to the south for sight-­seeing and adventure tourism. Antarctica is often perceived as the last unexploited place on Earth, with the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) preventing ownership by any one nation, and the ATS’s environmental instruments offering protection. Nevertheless, the continent has long been – and continues to be – put to use for a wide range of commercial and recreational purposes. This chapter details the range of material and imaginary resources that have been taken from Antarctica, and provides the context for the continent’s commercialisation. How different people view this situation depends on their values and on their ‘Antarctic imaginary’ – the cluster of values, tropes and ideas that they associate with the place. The cultural frame through which we view Antarctica is often taken for granted, but it is this frame that plays a vital role in shaping our values and priorities. The second part of the chapter therefore examines representations of the continent in the advertising media, highlighting the various ways Antarctica has been used symbolically. At the outset of human engagement with the region, sealing, whaling, and fishing all showed ‘proof of the commercial value of Antarctic resources’,8 and helped to focus the attention of scientists, governments, and capitalists.9 As the early harvesting industries gave way to inland and seaborne exploration, successive individuals looked both to the oceans and to the Antarctic continent itself in order to find ways to fund future expeditions. The German-­Australian naturalist Ferdinand von Mueller forecast possible commercial gains from ‘extracting mineral wealth’10 when trying to secure expedition funding for an Australian Antarctic Exploration Committee in the late nineteenth century. Soon afterwards, the explorer Carsten Borchgrevink investigated the commercial uses of both mineral deposits and penguin guano during his 1898–1900 expedition,11 concluding that ‘future Antarctic exploration never will be in want of financial support’.12 Over the following century, the relationship between Antarctica and commercialisation has been reframed in many different ways, with environmental consciousness coming to the fore. Perceptions of the region are shaped by cultural inputs, meaning that marketing is a very important tool for swaying public opinion in one direction or another. As the continent 183

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 183

21/12/2016 10:11

184  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica has become ever more visible, representations of Antarctica in the media have come to assume an ever more important role. As Elena Glasberg puts it, ‘valuing Antarctica is as much indexed to the representational . . . systems that frame Antarctica’ as it is to the actual physical continent itself.13 Such representational systems play an important role in shaping our view of the south: from onsite whaling and tourism, to representations of penguins and ice in advertising campaigns, Antarctica is firmly entrenched within our commercial world in a range of ways. As food and water shortages loom and different value sets emerge, the commercial applications of Antarctic resources will remain an important political issue.

SECRET AND SECRETIVE RESOURCE GEOGRAPHIES: WHALING, SEALING AND FISHING The history of resource extraction in the Antarctic is as old as the first-­known human interactions with the continent. These date back to the eighteenth century, when the continent was first sighted and mapped by sealers and whalers. In 1820/21, Captain Edward Bransfield (UK), Captain Nathaniel Palmer (USA) and Admiral Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen (Russia) all sighted Antarctica – sightings that ‘opened a brief period of exploration motivated by commercial concerns’.14 As the location of hunting grounds was commercially valuable information, ‘sealing captains and entrepreneurs were notoriously secretive’15 about their whereabouts, and as a result many maps and ship’s logs are vague, or include deliberate errors in order to mislead any competitors. Thus, the unreliable nature of the earliest records of human interaction with Antarctica has at its heart a commercial cause. The fears of the captains about losing exclusive access to their hunting grounds were not unwarranted. Concerns about the sustainability of the industry were raised in the middle of the nineteenth century by writers such as James Fenimore Cooper (see The Sea Lions, 1849, which Elizabeth Leane has described as ‘a call for sustainable harvesting of Antarctic marine mammals’),16 and by the late nineteenth century fur seals had been hunted almost to extinction for their valuable blubber, skins and furs. Whales were not far behind. Commercial whaling in the Antarctic was made possible in the late nineteenth century by advances in technology,17 and shore-­based whaling stations around the Antarctic Peninsula and sub-­Antarctic islands were active from 1904 onwards.18 Whales were flensed for their blubber, and their baleen (or ‘whalebone’) was used to make garments such as ladies’ corsets. Whale oil was used to make margarine, to lubricate machinery, and even to light the street lamps of major cities in Europe and the USA.19 At the same time (1890–1920), the penguins of Macquarie Island were being rendered down for oil. The practice led to controversy for Joseph Hatch, who owned the licence for this industry, when details of his operation were criticised as inhumane20 by leading public figures, including the polar explorers Apsley Cherry-­Garrard, Douglas Mawson and Frank Hurley.21 Concern over the welfare of the penguins led to a push for a wildlife reserve and calls for an end to commercial harvesting on the island, in what has been termed ‘one of the first international wildlife campaigns’.22 Such concerns foreshadowed attitudes to the Antarctic continent that would prevail later that century. In the early twentieth century, however, Antarctic commodities were consumed – ­sometimes ­unknowingly – right across the planet. The widespread commercial use of

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 184

21/12/2016 10:11

Selling the south  185 whales ­eventually culminated in stock collapses in the early twentieth century,23 and led to moratoria on the harvesting of Antarctic-­based species. Whaling and sealing are now controlled by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals (CCAS). Both currently have allowable catch limits of zero, although limited ‘scientific whaling’ continues to be undertaken by Japan,24 with whale meat appearing on the Japanese domestic market. Among the various goods to have been taken north from Antarctica and traded in the past half-­century are fish, krill, and even small quantities of melted ice itself.25 More recently, large-­scale marine activities have culminated in ‘biological prospecting involving Antarctic living matter’.26 As technologies and priorities evolve and change, so too do the ways in which we take resources from Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. Antarctic fisheries are currently managed by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). Established in 1982 as a direct result of increased commercial interest in Antarctic krill stocks,27 CCAMLR takes an ecosystem-­based approach to the use of resources, and is responsible for setting total allowable catches for fish and krill. While fish that is caught in the Southern Ocean is rarely marketed as coming from Antarctica,28 for krill the origin of location has long been a drawcard in advertising campaigns, where images of penguins and pristine icescapes abound. Associating the purity of an environment with a product that is created by taking resources from that same environment can be problematic. The perceived mismatch between the ‘wilderness value’29 of the Antarctic and the commercial activities that are undertaken in the Southern Ocean is at the heart of several campaigns that have protested against the krill fishing industry; petitions have described krill fishing as ‘the plunder of Antarctica and one of the last unspoiled oceans on the planet’30 and claimed, ‘the Antarctic shouldn’t be a place for profit’.31 In this case, two different conceptual versions of Antarctica collide: on the one hand, Antarctica is seen as a pristine wilderness that should be left alone, and on the other hand, as a place that should be carefully managed in order to provide sustainable resources on an ongoing basis. In this context, the allowability of commercial potential is a value in itself. Audiences in different nations at various times have interpreted the value of Antarctica and Antarctic resources in different ways, giving more or less weight to ­so-­called ‘intrinsic values’32 (such as wilderness or aesthetic values) or commercial potential. This is true for both sea-­based and land-­based resources, and continues to have a direct influence on Antarctic policy.

RESOURCE PROSPECTING Concerns over the commercial use of a range of Antarctic resources underlie many of the ATS documents. Mawson’s 1913 assertion that ‘the geographical range of Antarctica, south of Australia . . . should be formally annexed with a view to its commercial ­exploitation’33 highlights the fact that resource use and territorial claims have long been ­intertwined – as Brigid Hains puts it, ‘imperialism has always had economic dimensions’.34 Commercial interests provided one motivation for the partitioning of Antarctica35 prior to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. Since the treaty came into force in 1961, several annexes and protocols have been drawn up in response to developing concerns, such as the use of natural resources, and the protection of the environment. Antarctica

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 185

21/12/2016 10:11

186  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica is known to contain minerals such as cobalt, chromium, nickel and gold, as well as iron ore, coal, and h ­ ydrocarbons.36 During the 1980s, anxieties over the imminent use of such mineral resources led to the drafting of the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities (CRAMRA).37 Concluded on 2 June 1988, CRAMRA was intended to provide a framework for the future extraction of such resources while ensuring ‘that Antarctic mineral resource activities, should they occur, are compatible with scientific investigation in Antarctica and other legitimate uses of Antarctica’ and noting ‘the unique ecological, scientific and wilderness value of Antarctica and the importance of Antarctica to the global environment’.38 The same anxieties that led to the initial discussions meant that the convention was never ratified, however. During the 1980s, there was both a growing push for exploitation of Antarctica to take place for the benefit of all nations, and a counter push to see Antarctica set aside as a World Park.39 As a result of both growing political interest and publicised activism on the ice (such as the Greenpeace World Park Base 1987–1992),40 more people became aware of the issues surrounding human engagement with the continent.41 By 1988 a convention that was seen to allow mining was not compatible with the environmental values of public opinion, particularly in Australia and France.42 Instead, fears of resource exploitation and environmental degradation led to the drafting and signing of The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (Madrid Protocol) in 1991. The Madrid Protocol includes a Prohibition of Mineral Resource Activities (Article 7), meaning that the potential funding stream identified by Borchgrevink and Mawson some 100 years ago remains off limits, unless and until any review of the Protocol is undertaken. Biological prospecting (or ‘bioprospecting’), however, is a different story. Described as a ‘hybrid activity – part science, part industry’,43 bioprospecting involves the extraction of living organisms with commercial intent. A 2005 Working Paper presented by New Zealand to the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting identifies bioprospecting as ‘extending beyond the discovery stage to the commercial application stage’.44 Products with Antarctic roots have already made it to the shelves of consumers, with anti-­freeze proteins, cosmetics, nutraceuticals (fortified foodstuffs that provide health benefits) and food-­related products promoted directly to the public. With an estimated 200 companies and research institutes involved in biological prospecting,45 including organisations from Du Pont and Unilever to the University of Oxford, this is a growing field. It is also a contentious one. Ethical issues can emerge if there are conflicts of interest between scientific work and opportunities for generating income.46 Yves Frenot, director of the French Polar Institute, has described the economic activity associated with using genetic resources as ‘difficult to reconcile with . . . the Antarctic Treaty’.47 The Treaty calls for open access to information, whereas commercial ventures have a vested interest in patenting and protecting their Antarctic-­based discoveries and intellectual property. The topic has been raised at several Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings (2005, 2009, 2013). It was declared in 2013 that ‘the Antarctic Treaty System is the appropriate framework for managing the collection of biological material in the Antarctic Treaty area and for considering its use’,48 but tensions between scientific and commercial interests remain. Much of this tension relates to the ways Antarctica is conceptualised: is it a pure, untouched wilderness, or just another part of the world waiting to be used for human ­purposes? The idea of purity regularly comes to the fore in the promotional material for products with Antarctic roots, such as krill oil, or the skincare cream ‘Antarctilyne’.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 186

21/12/2016 10:11

Selling the south  187 Promoted in Australia by ‘Skin Doctors’ throughout 2005,49 this product contains Antarcticine, a glycoprotein that was discovered at the bottom of a glacier in Admiralty Bay by scientists from the University of Barcelona. Promotional material describes how Antarcticine is produced by an extremophile – a ‘survival’ molecule which actually thrives in extreme conditions. And it doesn’t get more extreme than Antarctica. Yet Antarcticine has survived for millions of years. If Antarcticine is so resilient, so powerful that it can survive in such extreme conditions – just imagine what it could do for your skin!50

Tropes of purity and extremity combine in this marketing pitch – Antarctica is an extreme environment, so anything that can survive there must be extremely tough. At the same time, the directive to ‘imagine what it could do for your skin’ evokes ideas of glacial beauty, and of time standing still. The implication is that this product can halt time, preserving youth.51 Here the advertising material draws upon existing symbols and connotations to market a product by both highlighting the Antarctic origin of the product, and capitalising on existing Antarctic tropes. The value of many such Antarctic resources comes from a mixture of the material and the symbolic – that is, the Antarctic sourcing, with the symbolism it entails, adds to the commercial potential of the item itself.

ANTARCTIC TOURISM Antarctic tropes are also used to market Antarctica itself as a destination, and no discussion about Antarctica and commercialisation would be complete without the inclusion of tourism. Antarctic tourism has been variously defined as ‘all human activities either mainly pursuing recreational and/or educational purposes’52 on the continent, and – more specifically – ‘the commercial (for profit) transport (including accommodation and ­catering) of nongovernment travellers to and from Antarctica for the purpose of pleasure’.53 Antarctic tourism has a much longer history than is often realised, as it could be argued that George Buckley, a wealthy farmer from New Zealand, fit the ‘tourist’ bill back in 1907. Having donated to Ernest Shackleton’s 1907 Nimrod expedition, he was permitted to accompany the ship to the edge of the ice and back for recreational reasons.54 Other scholars have suggested that Lawrence Oates and Apsley Cherry-­Garrard – both of whom received a place on Robert Falcon Scott’s 1914 Terra Nova expedition in exchange for donations – could be described as ‘tourist-­like’ as a result of the financial exchange that took place.55 Today commerce and recreation are key features of Antarctic tourism operations. Several companies offer small group expeditions to the continent’s interior in the footsteps of Heroic Era explorers, or to scale peaks such as Vinson Massif, the highest mountain in Antarctica. Most tourists, however, travel only to the edges of the continent, and they do so either by air or by sea.56 Antarctic tourism on a commercial scale began in 1958, with guests from Argentina heading for the South Shetland Islands aboard Les Eclaireurs.57 Air-­based tourism began at around the same time, with an Argentinian Douglas DC-­6B aircraft offering a four-­hour scenic flight for sixty-­six passengers over the peninsula region in 1956. Swedish entrepreneur Lars-­Erik Lindblad began offering regular voyages to the Antarctic Peninsula for fare-­paying passengers in the late 1960s, and was responsible for building the ‘Lindblad Explorer’, the world’s first ship designed for Antarctic tourism.58 Lindblad’s model of small expedition-­style vessels continues to

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 187

21/12/2016 10:11

188  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica be used today, with twenty-­nine Category 1 (13–200 passengers) and Category 2 (201–500 passengers) vessels regularly heading south, carrying between them the bulk of the 40,000 tourists who visit Antarctica every season. The International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators (IAATO), which collects these figures, was founded by industry players in 1991 in order to ‘advocate and promote the practice of safe and environmentally responsible private-­sector travel to the Antarctic.’59 Both the existence and the longevity of the organisation point to the importance of the tourism sector in mediating human experiences of the south. The tourist experience of the continent is a prime example of how commercial operations offer for consumption a particular version of Antarctica. In ‘Valuing Antarctica’ Neufeld concludes that ‘wilderness and aesthetic values are commodities that are sold to the global consumer society, as experiences or concepts’.60 Tourists take photographs to remember their voyage by, and to create memories of what is billed as a once-­in-­a-­lifetime experience. Tour companies are also active agents, creating the Antarctic experience for their clients: penguins, seals, whales, icebergs and a continental landing are all on the agenda. This experience must match up to the expectations set by glossy tour brochures, which in turn are informed by dominant Antarctic tropes. As Anne Noble puts it, the Antarctic Peninsula is ‘the perfect place to take people to recapture that photograph, that image of Antarctica they already have’.61 A quick look through brochures for the 2015 Antarctic season reveals images of icebergs, glaciers, and penguins, and recurring language such as ‘pristine’, ‘unspoiled’, and ‘wilderness’.62 The fact that such language and images continue to be used in promotional material year after year speaks to the continued resonance of such themes in an Antarctic context. Themes of heroism, purity and extremity all emerge as selling points, and all draw on narratives from Antarctica’s human past. While the continent is the intended destination for tourists, what is being sold here is the promise of Antarctica, a mythical combination of images and language that construct a semiotic story of a faraway place.

SELLING STORIES: ANTARCTIC EXPLORATION AND THE MEDIA While narratives of Antarctic exploration or other endeavours ostensibly seem outside of, even inimical to, commercial exploitation, they are actually embedded in and to some degree determined by commercial context. Narratives of the exotic lure of the Far South have been used by explorers for well over a century as a way to gain both sponsorship and financing for expeditions. Publishers back home readily embraced these accounts as marketable products. This is most readily illustrated by the narratives of prominent early explorers such as Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton and Richard Byrd. While it is easy to take such narratives ‘as read’ and believe that every element of the account is spontaneous, unadulterated truth, it must be remembered that stories are published in a commercial context and must conform to expectations and conventions.63 In some cases, ghost-­writers were employed to ensure that official accounts sounded thrilling enough to appeal to the general public, and it is these carefully curated narratives that have since entered into common cultural memory. These texts are not necessarily windows into the inner lives of explorers. As Barczewski reminds her readers, when it came to career

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 188

21/12/2016 10:11

Selling the south  189 e­ xplorers such as Robert Falcon Scott, ‘diary-­keeping was part of the business of exploration’,64 not a luxury undertaken for personal self-­analysis. As he lay dying in his tent, Scott was well aware that the text he wrote would later be available for public consumption. In this context, objects take on different commercial geographies and mobilities in their own right; the fact that Scott was found with his notebook ready for retrieval is testament to the power he knew his words and story would have. Conversely, part of the reason that Amundsen’s success did not capture the public imagination to the same extent was its perceived lack of drama: the British publisher Heinemann complained that Amundsen did not make his polar journey sound exciting enough, and his book deal was rescinded.65 There have likewise been strong links between the news media and Antarctic exploration since the Heroic Era began. Fame was a product not only of explorers’ abilities, but of the way their feats were marketed to the public, leading James Ryan to conclude that ‘explorers, press, publishers and societies of science and empire all played a part in fermenting a complex “culture of exploration”’.66 As geographical exploration was dramatised in order to appeal to a wider audience, the explorer became a celebrity, and ‘expeditions became carefully orchestrated narratives structured to maximize publicity and dramatic appeal’.67 News barons such as George Newnes and William Randolph Hearst both benefitted from and helped to create the ‘hero business’, because as stories of polar exploration reached home, they were marketed by an existing media industry that was hungry for new content, both textual and visual. Around the turn of the twentieth century, high latitude exploration was a lucrative media investment, so marketing Antarctica was a smart business choice. Explorers for their part were entirely aware of the importance of marketing themselves and selling their stories. Anglo-­Norwegian explorer Carsten Borchgrevink is a case in point. Borchgrevink’s 1898 Southern Cross expedition was financed by Newnes, best known for his daily newspaper The Westminster Gazette and periodical publications The Strand and The Wide World Magazine. Newnes provided the funding for the expedition to take place, and in return collected an exclusive scoop on the resulting exploration. Antarctic photographs accompanied these news stories, thus making visible the continent to a wide audience back in England. Although it was costly to fit out an expedition such as the Southern Cross, the stories that appeared in Newnes’ media stable were popular enough to warrant the expense: increased demand for the next instalments meant increased circulation, in turn making the advertising space in the publications all the more valuable. While the platforms through which media is consumed have changed over the past 100 years, links between explorers and the media have remained important. Modern-­day adventurers continue to secure book deals and media sponsorship: Reinhold Messner’s 1989 transantarctic journey was partially supported by Der Spiegel magazine, while in 2010 the polar explorer Kevin Biggar explained ‘we are working with a modern-­ day “newspaper” – the Xtra internet portal’.68 Selling one’s story to the media is still an important part of funding, promoting and selling an Antarctic expedition.

SPONSORSHIP IN ANTARCTICA Many products first came to Antarctica with explorers as part of endorsement or sponsorship deals. While such deals meant that expeditions were fitted out with n ­ ecessary

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 189

21/12/2016 10:11

190  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica equipment for little cost, it is important to remember that ‘sponsorships are not ­altruistic . . . their goal is the exploitation of commercial objectives’.69 Scottish industrialist William Beardmore, for instance, financed Ernest Shackleton’s 1907 Nimrod expedition. Beardmore had recently acquired the Arrol-­Johnston Company,70 so he arranged to send a car south on the expedition as a publicity stunt. Often, such products were later featured in adverting campaigns that drew on their Antarctic history. Horlick’s Malted Milk Company was one of many to include photographs of their product being loaded for the Antarctic voyage and radiograms from Admiral Byrd in advertising material.71 The quality of the product is highlighted in Byrd’s testimonial that ‘There is one really strength-­giving food for the explorer, in powder or tablet form – Horlick’s the Original Malted Milk.’72 Other companies that leveraged the association of their food product with Antarctica included both Oxo and Fry’s Cocoa (with adverts starring Robert Falcon Scott), and Bovril, which used testimonials from Shackleton in a series of adverts while his Endurance expedition was in the Antarctic (1914–1916).73 Such high-­profile endorsements continue today; Horlick’s, for one, has continued to capitalise on its Antarctic links, becoming the official hot drink sponsor for the 2013 ‘Walking with the Wounded’ trek to the South Pole.74 Antarctica continues to carry such stories of sponsorship: the commercial history of the south is writ large across the cartographical icescape, where Antarctic place-­names act as ‘shorthand for its history’.75 Borchgrevink named several geographical features after the sponsor of his expedition, including Newnes Land (after Sir George himself); Lady Newnes Bay (named for the sponsor’s wife); and Frank Newnes Glacier, ‘after Frank Newnes, Esq., the only son of Sir George Newnes, Bart’.76 During his second expedition (1933–1935) Admiral Byrd named geographic features after almost all of his sponsors, leading to monikers such as the Edsel Ford Range,77 and the Rockefeller Mountains.78 More recently, the generically named ‘Sponsors’ Peak’, located between Barwick Valley and the Upper Victoria Glacier, was named for the sponsors of the 1958–59 Victoria University of Wellington Antarctic Expedition (VUWAE).79 These names map out the human history of Antarctica, leaving memories of past commercial interests as well as past expeditions embedded in the cartographic landscape for future generations to excavate. Today, new Antarctic place-­names must be submitted to national Naming Committees for approval before being recorded in the SCAR Composite Gazetteer of Antarctica80 and entering into official circulation. Most committee guidelines exclude commercial names from being considered,81 but many historical place-­names do have commercial roots. Examples within the SCAR gazetteer include the Horlick Mountains, named by Admiral Byrd in 1924;82 and Mobiloil Inlet, named by Sir Hubert Wilkins in 1928 after the Vacuum Oil Company of Australia (creators of Mobiloil).83 Machinery that has been used in Antarctica has also acted as the namesake for mountains and glaciers, such as the Arrol Icefall84 (named after Shackleton’s Arrol Johnston motor car); Mount Tucker (named for the Tucker Sno-­Cat Corporation of Medford, Oregon, creators of the vehicles used in the Trans Antarctic Expedition of 1957–58);85 and the Bombardier and Havilland Glaciers (named for the manufacturer responsible for making the tracked sno-­ cat and skidoo vehicles and for the de Havilland Twin Otter, ‘the workhorse of Antarctic ­aviation’, ­respectively).86 In these cases, a physical link has become permanent, with the names enduring long past the lifespan of the actual pistons and tracks. These brand

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 190

21/12/2016 10:11

Selling the south  191 names, which date to the mid-­twentieth century when the last major Antarctic ‘firsts’ were being tackled, add another layer to the commercial history of Antarctica.

ANTARCTICA IN ADVERTISING Modern-­day advertisements continue to build upon narratives of Antarctica’s history while bringing echoes of the past to the fore. The 2013 ‘Walking with the Wounded’ expedition is a prime example of how the earliest marketing techniques to be associated with Antarctica continue to be useful today. The expedition saw war veterans from the UK, USA and the Commonwealth (Australia and Canada), all of whom had been wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan, race to the South Pole. Sponsorship from a range of companies such as Virgin, Noom Coach, and Glenfiddich whisky provided the expedition with funds to go ahead, and in return each company was provided with positive media coverage and photographs of its brand name in situ in the Antarctic. Such a scenario is not rare – indeed, there is now an entire industry dedicated to ‘matchmaking’ would-­be explorers and corporate sponsors.87 Glenfiddich offers a fruitful case study, illustrating the symbolic value of Antarctica. The company had no particular Antarctic link prior to the expedition, but saw the opportunity to create one by building a physical link via sponsorship of the UK team, thus adding to the strategic narrative of the company in the process. A widespread advertising campaign back in London in 2013 drew on Glenfiddich’s newfound Antarctic association. The campaign, which ran as magazine adverts, posters, and signage in the London underground, included images of men on skis towing sledges and trekking through a polar landscape, and ran under the tagline ‘Spirit of a Nation’. Here, modern-­day British war veterans who were injured in combat take the place of Heroic Era men, both literally as they walk in their footsteps, and metaphorically, as they take on the role of ‘hero’. Glenfiddich sponsored the expedition because, as Senior Brand Manager Sarah Harding explained, ‘the stories they tell, the inspirational people and how they have overcome challenges, has a spirit which matches our heritage’.88 The heritage Harding points to is itself a construction, shaped by narratives that valorise white European men, such as the Antarctic explorers of the Heroic Era. According to Neville Peat, whisky is the quintessential explorer’s drink, ‘steeped in history, maturity, endurance, character, and edgy technology’.89 Such connections made the modern-­ day ‘Walking with the Wounded’ Antarctic trek an ideal fit (as far as Glenfiddich was ­concerned) for their brand. In this case, the use of Antarctica carries connotations of both heroism and imperialism. Alongside the men in polar dress, the adverts feature a limited-­edition whisky that was created for the event, called ‘Spirit of a Nation’. They enrol a particular British nationalism both in the product’s name and by visually reminding a British audience of earlier expeditions into the south that resulted in the claiming of the British Antarctic Territory. In this instance, charity becomes the socially acceptable version of imperialism, while the Antarctic environment reinforces the heroic narrative. The veterans taking part in the ‘Walking with the Wounded’ expedition were all injured in politically fraught neo-­imperial conflicts. Polar explorers, however, ‘are reliable and safe, non confrontational heroes for confusing times’.90 Conflating modern-­day war veterans with Heroic Era explorers both makes acceptable ideas of imperialism, and illustrates how the theme of heroism continues to linger about the Antarctic ice.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 191

21/12/2016 10:11

192  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Other companies have sent their products down to the coldest, highest, driest, windiest place on earth to prove themselves in the ultimate testing ground that is Antarctica. A 1960s Volkswagen campaign that centred on ‘the first car at the bottom of the world’91 is a case in point. An Antarctic ‘first’ was – and still is – worthy of media attention, which can in turn be translated into high-­profile advertising. In 1963 a Volkswagen Beetle was taken south to Australia’s Mawson station, becoming ‘the first production car in the Antarctic’.92 Dubbed ‘Antarctica 1’ by VW, and ‘The Red Terror’ by local scientists on account of its ruby colouring,93 the car spent just one year at Mawson, before being returned back to VW Australia for publicity purposes.94 That publicity included appearances around the country, as well as in adverts in the pages of newspapers and magazines such as Life and Women’s Weekly. A photograph of the polar beetle heading off towards an icy horizon was captioned ‘First car in Antarctica’,95 and neatly captured the idea of a vehicle going where none had gone before.96 In this advert, ideas of precedence meet with those of toughness: man vs. wild becomes machine vs. wild, and the triumph of the machine becomes a prime selling point. As the June 1963 issue of the in-­house VWA Magazine explained, ‘Antarctica proves once again the known Volkswagen reputation for quality, reliability, and durability.’ 97 An extreme environment necessitates extreme machinery, so employing an Antarctic theme across all advertising platforms was used to ‘bring home the point that the Volkswagen is, of course, the only car that can handle Antarctica’.98 It is worth noting that in the 1960s any negative connotations of a car (and therefore pollution) intruding into the pristine wilderness of Antarctica were not widespread. Fast forward several decades to an era where environmental protection is paramount, and the advertisement seems incongruent; following Volkswagen’s 2015 emissions scandal,99 the juxtaposition of their machinery with an Antarctic landscape brings major environmental questions to the fore. Cheating on emissions tests to produce a clean image inflects ironically on Volkswagen’s attempt in the older campaign to construct an ‘extreme’ image around their car. Protecting Antarctica’s ice is now seen as more important than dominating the landscape, so a car in the ice now carries more negative than positive connotations. This is a prime example of how the cultural meaning attached to particular images can change drastically over time, and in light of intervening events. Antarctica has appeared in many more advertisements over the past 100 years, used to promote everything from dog food to Ray Ban sunglasses to investment firms. Such advertisements are particularly interesting because they recycle ideas that are already in common cultural circulation. As Judith Williamson puts it, ‘they feed off the iconography of the present, at the same time as perpetuating it’.100 This makes them an ideal medium through which to examine representations of Antarctica; to find out what narratives and tropes have been attached to the place at various points in time; and to analyse the significance of dominant themes. Heroism is one such theme that emerges time and again, with masculine figures battling the blizzard to promote everything from video cameras and insurance, to dog food and Guinness beer. Other common tropes that have been associated with Antarctica include purity (as seen in fridge adverts), extremity (in conjunction with watches, paint and North Face clothing), and fragility (evidenced in both Elena Glasberg’s analysis of a 1994 Chrysler advert that features the ozone hole,101 and a 2005 ABB advert starring King Penguins and the caption ‘Cut 68 million tonnes of C02 and it’s amazing what you save’).102 These umbrella terms cover a range of ‘Antarctic brand values’,103 such as cleanliness, beauty, the final frontier and global cooperation. Such

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 192

21/12/2016 10:11

Selling the south  193 values have been employed in advertising time and again for a range of purposes, and one of the tasks of the newly emerging field of critical Antarctic studies is to tease out those purposes and legacies.

CONCLUSION Antarctica can – and has – been put to use for a range of commercial ends. Some of these have involved taking resources directly from the southern continent and its surrounding ocean,104 while others work symbolically, drawing upon associations of purity, extremity, heroism or fragility in order to create conceptual links between Antarctica and products that are sold back home. Antarctica is often seen as a paradigmatically non-­human space in which commerce has no natural place; ever since the signing of the Antarctic Treaty in 1959, capitalism has been seen as anathema to Antarctic values, and the perceived incompatibility of the two has been central to ongoing debates about resources and tourism. In fact, the human history of the continent has always been intertwined with resources and profits. It was commercial interest in marine mammals that led to much of the early mapping of the Antarctic continent, while the resources and activities that Mawson remarked upon back in 1913 – whales, seals, birds, fish, and even tourism – all have a commercial history in the south. In recent years, bioprospecting has seen a range of new products emerge on the market, with nutraceuticals and cosmetic products touting their Antarctic links back home. Such examples show that the commercialisation of Antarctica is neither new nor hidden. The increasing penetration of Antarctica into the domestic environment through channels such as films, books, and advertisements is a powerful political force that is often overlooked: as representations of Antarctica reach more people, the continent begins to figure in the consciousness of a much larger population. Marketing has an important role to play in this process of awareness. As Kevin Roberts of Saatchi & Saatchi puts it, in our profit-­driven world ‘commerce transmits ideas faster and more efficiently than any other means’.105 Although it may seem counterintuitive to associate Antarctica with advertising, advertisements point to Antarctica within our everyday lives in a tangible way, regardless of whether the product in question has any tangible link to the south. Advertisements can therefore provide a useful reflection of various attitudes towards Antarctica in general, and the commercialisation of the continent. Antarctic resources are simultaneously material and symbolic, gaining commercial value both from what they are and the ideas they evoke. Both elements need to be considered in any discussion of ‘selling the south’.

NOTES   1. Mawson 1913, 216.   2. Hains 2002, 48.   3. Mawson suggested that a food source for the said foxes was already present in the Antarctic, as ‘the consumption of a few hundred thousand penguins annually would, if otherwise protected, be unnoticed at many of the large rookery areas’ 1913, 215.   4. Mawson 1913, 216.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 193

21/12/2016 10:11

194  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica   5. Under the terms of the 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection. 4 October 1991, 30 ILM 1455.  6. See Antarctic Ice Marathon & 100K and Antarctica Marathon and Half Marathon 2016.   7. Australia’s Mawson Station, named for Douglas Mawson, uses two 300kw turbines (built in 2003) as part of a co-­generation system. www.antarctica.gov.au/.   8. Neufeld 2014, 248.   9. Maddison 2014, 197.   10. Baughmann 1994, 14.   11. Harrowfield 2004.   12. Borchgrevink 1901, 179.   13. Glasberg 2012, 77.   14. Baughmann 1994, 7.   15. Maddison 2014, 110.   16. Leane 2012, 45.   17. Senatore and Zarankin 2014, 125.   18. Hince 2001, 312. The first shore-­based whaling station was established on South Georgia in 1904.   19. Maizonave 2006, 721.   20. National Oceans Office 2002, 6.   21. Hains 2002, 49. Mawson collected and analysed both seal and penguin oil in order to make predictions about the economic viability of these industries, but he favoured planned and controlled commericalisation with a scientific basis over unregulated culling driven solely by profit.   22. Pearce 2012.   23. IWC 2015.   24. Hodgson-­Johnston 2014. In March 2014 the International Court of Justice ruled the JARPA II whaling programme was ‘not for the purposes of scientific research’. JARPA II was subsequently replaced by the NEWREP-­A programme.   25. Hult and Ostrander (1973) discuss harvesting Antarctic icebergs for fresh water, while a one-­off run of thirty bottles of ‘Antarctic Nail Ale’ Beer containing Antarctic ice was bottled and marketed in late 2010 as ‘possibly the world’s oldest and purest beer’.   26. Dodds 2012, 109.   27. CCAMLR website 2015.  28. An exception is the Antarctic Toothfish caught by members of The Coalition of Legal Toothfish Operators (COLTO), who have sought transparency over supply chains.   29. For an analysis of wilderness and aesthetic values in Antarctica see Summerson 2013.   30. Sum of Us 2014.   31. Sea Shepherd 2015.   32. 4 October 1991, 30 ILM 1455 Article 3 of The Madrid Protocol provides protection for – but no specific definition of – ‘the intrinsic value of Antarctica, including its wilderness and aesthetic values and its value as an area for the conduct of scientific research, in particular research essential to understanding the global environment.’   33. Mawson 1913, 182.   34. Hains 2002, 48.   35. Argentina, Australia, Chile, Britain, France, New Zealand and Norway all made claims to Antarctica prior to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. The USA and USSR both reserved the right to make a claim in future.   36. Joyner 1988, 131. While their presence is known, the accessibility and commercial viability of such minerals is another question.   37. 2 June 1988, 27 ILM 868. This instrument has not entered into force, having been abandoned in favour of the Madrid Protocol.   38. CRAMRA, Preamble.   39. Beck 2014, 310. Beck describes this as a classic example of tensions between T. O’Riodan’s ‘technocentric’ (exploit resources) and ‘ecocentric’ (conserve environment) approaches.   40. Greenpeace 2012.   41. Orheim 2013, 287.   42. British Antarctic Survey ‘Mining’ www.bas.ac.uk/about/antarctica/environmental-­protection/mining/.   43. Liggett and Hemmings 2011, 82.  44. New Zealand and Sweden 2005, 2. According to this model, marketing is the final phase of bioprospecting.   45. Dodds 2012, 125.   46. Hughes and Bridge 2010.   47. Quoted in Doyle 2009.   48. ATCM XXXVI – CEP XVI ‘Biological Prospecting in Antarctica’.   49. Leane 2009, 199.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 194

21/12/2016 10:11

Selling the south  195   50.   51.   52.   53.  54.   55.   56.   57.   58.   59.   60.   61.   62.   63.   64.   65.   66.   67.   68.   69.   70.   71.   72.  73.  74.   75.   76.   77.   78.   79.   80.   81.

  82.   83.   84.   85.   86.   87.   88.   89.   90.  91.   92.   93.   94.

Salonlines Hair and Beauty 2015. Leane 2009, 200. Haase 2008, 48. Bauer 2001, 15. Taranaki Herald 1908, 2. Leane 2016, 175. Both men had assigned roles on the expedition, but did pay to travel on a journey that ‘presumably represented various pleasures’, at least in the initial stages. Both methods of tourism are still practiced, but the 1979 Erebus Disaster, which saw 257 people killed when an Air New Zealand plane crashed into the side of Mount Erebus, did put an end to overflights out of New Zealand. Headland 1994, 275. Liggett 2010. 357. There have been annual tourist trips to Antarctica every year since 1966, and the purpose-­built ‘Lindblad Explorer’ was both built and launched in 1969. IAATO 2015. Neufeld 2014, 248. Noble 2010. See Antarctic tour brochures from National Geographic Expeditions, Quark Expeditions, and Aurora Expeditions, among others. Along with commercial imperatives, prestige and honour also provide motivations for narrating events in particular ways. Barczewski 2007, 194. These diaries were usually taken home, edited, and used as the basis for the official expedition narrative. Heinemann 1912. Ryan 2013, 8. Matuozzi 2002, 210. Biggar 2010, 81. Vartorella 2014, 206. Peat 2013, 60. Other brands to run similar campaigns include Purina Mills Dog Food, Oakite cleaning products, and Ex-­Lax: The Chocolated Laxative. See Byrd 1935. Byrd 1935. The Illustrated London News. 1914, 191. http://walkingwiththewounded.org.uk/southpole2013/patron/sponsors/. Fox and Bazeley 2013. Borchgrevink 1901, 319. SCAR Composite Gazetteer of Antarctica. ID: 4809. SCAR Composite Gazetteer of Antarctica. ID: 12267. SCAR Composite Gazetteer of Antarctica. ID: 114441. The SCAR Composite Gazetteer of Antarctica is hosted by the Australian Antarctic Division at https:// data.aad.gov.au/aadc/gaz/scar/. The United States Board on Geographic Names will not consider ‘Names of contributors of funds, equipment, and supplies, who by the nature and tone of their advertising have endeavored to capitalize or to gain some commercial advantage as a result of their donations’ (United States Board on Geographic Names), while the Australian Antarctic Names and Medals Policy requires those naming new features to ‘avoid names of pets and commercial products’ (Australian Antarctic Division). SCAR Composite Gazetteer of Antarctica. ID: 1266989. SCAR Composite Gazetteer of Antarctica. ID: 128998. The Vacuum Oil Company is now known as Mobil. SCAR Composite Gazetteer of Antarctica. ID: 121937. SCAR Composite Gazetteer of Antarctica. ID: 111671. Fox and Bazeley 2013. Blumenfeld 2014. Quoted in Brownsall 2014. Peat 2013, 10. Peat highlights the associations between exploration and whisky, tracking the rediscovery and replication of Ernest Shackleton’s 1907 Rare Old Highland Malt. Glasberg 2011, 221. Life Magazine 1965, 25. Long and Matthews 1993, 68. Other motor vehicles to have been taken south included Ernest Shackleton’s Arrol Johnston Motor Car (1907) and Hubert Wilkins’ Baby Austin (1927). Long and Matthews 1993, 71. Long and Matthews 1993, 76.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 195

21/12/2016 10:11

196  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica  95.   96.  97.  98.   99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

Women’s Weekly 1963, 37. With the qualifier ‘production’ removed, this advert ignored the history of the Arrol Johnston motorcar. VWA Review 1963, 7. VWA Review 1963, 7. Hotten 2015. Williamson 2010. Glasberg 2012. ABB 2005. Roberts 1998. Walton 1996. Roberts 1998.

REFERENCES ABB. 2005. Cut 68 Million tons of CO2 and it’s amazing what you save. ABB Library. https://library.e.abb.com/ public/68ce4295bbc3f3e3c12571d900466988/84%20Preview_ENG72dpi.pdf. Antarctic Expedition.1908. Taranaki Herald, Volume LIV(13598) 3 January: 2. Antarctica Marathon and Half Marathon. 2015. Marathon Tours and Travel. www.marathontours.com. ATCM XXXVI – CEP XVI 2013. Biological prospecting in Antarctica. Resolution 6, ATCM XXXVI -­CEP XVI, Brussels. Australian Antarctic Division. 2013. Australian Antarctic Names and Medals Committee Policy. www1.data. antarctica.gov.au/database/gaz/antarctic_place_names_policy_dec2013.pdf. Barczewski, S. 2007. Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton and the Changing Face of Heroism. London: Hambledon Continuum. Bauer, T.G. 2001. Tourism in the Antarctic: Opportunities, Constraints, and Future Prospects. New York: Binghamton. Baughmann, T.H. 1994. Before the Heroes Came: Antarctica in the 1890s. London: University of Nebraska Press. Beck, P. 2014 [1986]. The International Politics of Antarctica (Routledge Revivals). New York: Routledge. Biggar, K. 2010. ‘Escape to the Pole’ Two Kiwi Guys Dodge Crevasses, Starvation & Marriage. Auckland: Random House. Blumenfeld, J. 2014. Get Sponsored: A Funding Guide for Explorers, Adventurers, and Would-­Be Travelers. New York: Skyhorse Publishing. Borchgrevink, C. 1901. First on the Antarctic Continent: Being an Account of the British Antarctic Expedition 1898–1900. London: George Newnes Ltd, Southampton St, Strand. Bovril Advertisement. 1914. The Illustrated London News. January 31: 191. Brownsall, A. 2014. Prince Harry pays tribute to charity sponsors Virgin Money and Glenfiddich. Marketing Magazine [online edition] 21 January 2014. Byrd, R.E. and Poulter, T.C. 1935. The Romance of Antarctic Adventure. New York: J.W. Clement Co. CCAMLR: Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. 2015. About CCAMLR. www.ccamlr.org. COLTO: Coalition of Legal Toothfish Operators. 2015. www.colto.org. CVS. 2014. Vacuuming Antarctica for krill..Sum of Us. www.sumofus.org. Dodds, K. 2012. The Antarctic: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Donovan, Richard. 2015. Antarctic Ice Marathon & 100K. www.icemarathon.com. Doyle, A. 2009. Antarctic patents strain goals of shared science. Reuters. 5 February 2009. Fenimore Cooper, J. 1849. The Sea Lions; or, The Lost Sealers. New York: Stringer and Townsend. Fox, A. and Bazeley, K. 2013. Naming the unnamed. Geographical Magazine. www.geographical.co.uk. Glasberg, E. 2012. On the road with Chrysler: Virtual capitalism and empire without territory. Pages 77–88 in Antarctica as Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Glasberg, E. 2011. ‘Living ice’: Rediscovery of the poles in an era of climate crisis. Women’s Studies Quarterly 39(¾): 221–46. Greenpeace. 2012. World park Antarctica. www.greenpeace.org. Haase, H. 2008. Tourism in the Antarctic: Modi Operandi and Regulatory Effectiveness. PhD Thesis. University of Canterbury, Christchurch. Hains, B. 2002. The Ice and the Inland: Mawson, Flynn, and the Myth of the Frontier. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 196

21/12/2016 10:11

Selling the south  197 Harrowfield, D. 2004. The history of the British Antarctic Expedition 1898–1900 occupation of Cape Adare. Conservation Plan for Cape Adare. Christchurch: The New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust. Headland, R.K. 1994. Historical development of Antarctic tourism. Annals of Tourism Research 21(2): 269–80. Heinemann, W. 1912. Letter to Fridtjof Nansen. March 18,1912. Ms.fol. 1924: 5, 3. Norwegian National Library. Hince, B. 2002. The Antarctic Dictionary: A Complete Guide to Antarctic English. Collingwood: CSIRO Publishing. Hodgson-­Johnston, I. and Jabour, J.A. 2014. Japan’s new whaling programme is a small win for whales, but . . . The Conversation. Hobart. 20 November. Hughes, K.A. and Bridge, P.D. 2010. Potential impacts of Antarctic bioprospecting and associated commercial activities upon Antarctic science and scientists. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 10: 13–18. Hult, J.L. and Ostrander, N.C. 1973. Antarctic Icebergs: A Global Fresh Water Resource. Prepared for the National Science Foundation. Santa Monica: Rand. Hotten, R. 2015. Volkswagen: The scandal explained BBC News. 10 December. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ business-­34324772. International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators (IAATO). 2015. www.iaato.org. International Whaling Commission. 2015. Status of Whales www.iwc.int/status. Joyner, C.C. 1988. The Evolving Minerals Regime for Antarctica. Pages 129–43 in Joyner and Chopra, S.K. (eds), The Antarctic Legal Regime. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff publishers. Leane, E. 2009. The land that time forgot: Fictions of Antarctic temporality. Pages 199–223 in Pordzik, R. (ed.), Futurescapes: Space in Utopian and Science Fiction Discourses. Spatial Practice 5. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Leane, E. 2012. Antarctica in Fiction: Imaginative Narratives of the Far South. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leane, E. 2016. South Pole. London: Reaktion Books. Life Magazine. 1965. The first car at the bottom of the world. 15 January: 25. Liggett, D. and Hemmings, A.D. 2011. Exploring Antarctic Values: Proceedings of the Workshop ‘Exploring Linkages between Environmental Management and Value Systems: The Case of Antarctica.’ University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, 5 December. SCAR Humanities and Social Sciences Expert Group. www.antarctica-­hasseg.com. Liggett, D., McIntosh, A., Thompson, A., Gilbert, N. and Storey, B. 2011. From frozen continent to tourism hotspot? Five decades of Antarctic tourism development management, and a glimpse into the future. Tourism Management 32: 357–66. Long, D. and Matthews, P. 1993. Knowing Australian Volkswagens: A Definitive History of the VW in Australia. Punchbowl: Bookworks Pty Ltd. Maddison, B. 2014. Class and Colonialism in Antarctic Exploration, 1750–1920. London: Pickering & Chatto. Maizonave, G.B., F.S. Dos Reis, J.C.M. Lima, A.J. Bombardieri, F.E. Chiapetta, G.B. Ceccon, R.R.N. Souza, Jr. Tonkoski 2006. Integrated system for intelligent street lighting. Industrial Electronics, 2006 IEEE International Symposium on. 9 July: 721–6. Matuozzi, R.N. 2002. Richard Byrd, polar exploration and the media. The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 110(2): 209–36. Mawson, D. 1913, 2010. The commercial resources of Antarctica. The Adelie Blizzard: Mawson’s Forgotten Newspaper 1913. Adelaide: The Friends of the State Library of South Australia in association with the Friends of Mawson at the South Australian Museum. 181. National Oceans Office. 2002. Resources: Macquarie Island’s Picture – The South-­east Regional Marine Plan Assessment Reports. Hobart: The National Oceans Office. Nail Ale Brewing. 2010. Antarctic Nail Ale. www.nailbrewing.com.au/special-­stories/antarctic-­nail-­ale.html. Neufeld, E., O’Reilly, J., Summerson, R., Tin, T. 2014. Valuing Antarctica: Emerging views from international studies. Pages 233–52 in Tin, T., Liggett, D., Maher, P.T. and Lamers, M. (eds), Antarctic Futures: Human Engagement with the Antarctic Environment. Netherlands: Springer. New Zealand and Sweden. 2005. Biological Prospecting in Antarctica. Working Paper 13, ATCM XXVIII, Stockholm. Noble, A. 2010. Antarctica Nullius. In Jerram, S. and McKinnon, D. (eds), Now Future: Dialogues with Tomorrow 2010 Series. www.dialogues.org.nz. Orheim, O. 2013. Managing the frozen commons. Pages 273–300 in David Walton (ed.), Antarctica: Global Science from a Frozen Continent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pearce, F. 2012. Boiled-­to-­death penguins are back from the brink. New Scientist. 22 (February). www.new scientist.com. Peat, P. 2013. Shackleton’s Whisky. London: Preface. Petition to stop Blackmores sale of krill products. 2015. Sea Shepherd. www.seashepherd.org.au/ blackmorespetition. Roberts, K. 1998. Antarctica – Anything is Possible. Address given Wednesday 29 April 1998. Christchurch, New Zealand. www.saatchikevin.com/speech/antarctica-­anything-­possible.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 197

21/12/2016 10:11

198  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Ryan, J.R. 2013. Photography and Exploration. London: Reaktion Books. SCAR Composite Gazeteer of Antarctica. 2014. Australian Government. https://data.aad.gov.au/aadc/gaz/ scar. Senatore, M.X. and Zarankin. A. 2014. Against the domain of master narratives: Archaeology and Antarctic history. Pages 121–32 in Gnecco, C. and Langebaek C. (eds), Against Typological Tyranny in Archaeology. New York: Springer Science + Business Media. Skin Doctors Antarctilyne Plump. 2015. Salonlines Hair and Beauty. www.salonlines.co.uk. Summerson, R.M.V. The Protection of Wilderness and Aesthetic Values in Antarctica. PhD Thesis. University of Melbourne, 2013. United States Board on Geographic Names. 2013. US Department of the Interior. http://geonames.usgs.gov/ antarctic. Vartorella, W.F. 2014. Redefining the ‘Heart of Darkness’: From Machiavelli to the moon and a road map to expedition sponsorships. Pages 205–8 in Blumenfeld, J. (ed.), Get Sponsored: A Funding Guide for Explorers, Adventurers, and Would-­Be Travelers. New York: Skyhorse Publishing. VWA Review. 1963. Advertising Campaign. June: 7. Walton, D.W.H. 1996. Making Money from Antarctica. Antarctic Science. 8(4): 311. Williamson, J. 2010. Unfreezing the truth: Knowledge and denial in climate change imagery. In Jerram, S. and McKinnon, D. (eds), Now Future: Dialogues with Tomorrow 2010 Series. Wellington: Now Future. Women’s Weekly. 1963. First Car in Antarctica. July 10: 37.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 198

21/12/2016 10:11

13.  Antarctic geopolitics Klaus Dodds

INTRODUCTION In 1957, a writer called John Andrews stole my proverbial thunder. He published an article called ‘Antarctic geopolitics’ in the journal, Australian Outlook, and it makes for intriguing reading some six decades later.1 I never had the pleasure of meeting Andrews but it would have been instructive, for me at least, to talk with him about how our mutual understandings of both geopolitics and Antarctica might have aligned with one another or not. Assuming he was writing in 1956 or early 1957, he was writing at an interesting time for both subject areas. In the case of geopolitics, for example, established scholars such as Richard Hartshorne were urging a new generation of political geographers to avoid the term ‘geopolitics’, positing the claim that it was an ‘intellectual poison’. What poisoned this academic field was a deeply felt unease that an association with Nazi Germany and Nazism had forever tainted geopolitics as both thought and practice. Hartshorne urged his fellow geographers to seek solace in mainstream political geography, and the emerging scholarly fields of quantitative and behavioural geography.2 What was interesting, however, was that non-­geographers were still willing to use the term ‘geopolitics’ in their analyses of world affairs – and that in Latin America geopolitics was widely taught in military colleges and universities.3 Andrews was also writing at an interesting time in Antarctic history. In 1957, the Soviet satellite Sputnik and the onset of the International Geophysical Year (IGY 1957–8) manifested a new era of scientific inquiry.4 The IGY was an extraordinary and intense period of international scientific investigation in Antarctica and other areas such as the oceans and the upper atmosphere, which transformed understanding of the polar continent and its relationship to planet Earth and the planetary system. It was as if the earth itself was placed under scientific scrutiny and surveillance.5 Andrews sensed that change was afoot and that the geopolitical and the geophysical were co-­constituted.6 As he remarked, ‘The discovery of any deposits that exist may not be an impossible task by geophysical methods even through considerable thicknesses of ice, and the success of methods of mining in north polar latitudes, as in Alaska and Spitsbergen, suggests that it may not be impossible to develop methods that would be technically successful in Antarctica.’7 Was strategic interest in Antarctica (and its resources) rising among interested nations because scientific understanding of the ice sheet, underlying geology, and marine biology of the Southern Ocean was expanding? Did this help explain why twelve countries were involved in IGY Antarctic programmes on the one hand and on the other hand account for why India raised the ‘Question of Antarctica’ in the UN in 1956?8 Was there a need for a new political regime for Antarctica in the face of an uncertain future?9 In his summation, Andrews posited an interesting aside about what we might think of as anticipatory Antarctic geopolitics: 199

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 199

21/12/2016 10:11

200  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica The political geography of Antarctica is, therefore, a very short story in terms of time, but it is a story which is rapidly becoming more complicated and demanding more attention in international circles . . . interests being affirmed today in case the economic, scientific, political or strategic importance of the continent should substantially increase in the future. Much of the present discussion, therefore, is in terms of what ‘might be’ rather than ‘what is’.10

His use of words such as ‘might be’ and ‘what is’ raise interesting questions about possible futures for Antarctica – some desirable and some perhaps to be best avoided. Some might in turn be more demanding in Andrews’s words of political and popular attention, while others barely register. In this chapter, I offer a dialogue with three different forms of ‘Antarctic geopolitics’. The first one I term an anticipatory Antarctic geopolitics, which peaked just before the negotiations leading to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. A further manifestation deferring Antarctic geopolitics is my second strand and finally, a more contemporary variant, of what I suggest is resilient Antarctic geopolitics. Where I find overlap, and this is developed in the concluding section, is a series of anticipatory logics (for example, pre-­emption, preparedness, resilience) and the manner in which the Antarctic is subject to a series of ‘demanding geopolitics’.11 The ‘demands’ may be varied but what unites them is a portfolio of demands placed on the continent and surrounding oceans by claimant, semi-­ claimant, and non-­claimant states, environmental organizations, fishing syndicates, and international governmental organizations such as the UN. The implications are to bring to the fore not only how the Antarctic is understood geographically, but also the kind of governance projects it is enrolled in.

ANTICIPATING ANTARCTIC GEOPOLITICS In his 1957 essay, Andrews does not offer a definition of geopolitics, and nor does he dwell much on why the term might have intellectual and political purchase. In fact, the terms ‘geopolitics’ and ‘political geography’ are used inter-­changeably. It is assumed, I think, that the ‘geopolitical’ and the ‘political geographical’ refer to things and themes such as resources, strategy, and access to the Antarctic. In that sense, his insights chime with a longer tradition of classical geopolitical thought. From its earliest inceptions in the 1890s, geopolitical writers were concerned with the power of the ‘geo’, the role of the physical geographies of the earth, such as land, sea, and ice, to shape political power.12 Another classical geopolitical theme that finds favour in Andrews’s article is the sense in which states compete with one another to secure strategic advantage, including through control of material resources, even in and over areas that might be considered to be quite remote from the dominant centres of population and political-­economic power. However, one thing that is worth noting at this stage is that Andrews was an Australian citizen and a branch president of the New South Wales section of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. As an Australian writer, his geographical outlook was profoundly shaped by a sense of geographical proximity of Australia to the polar continent and its seas.13 As he opined, ‘It is not always remembered that it is only a little over two t­ housand miles from Sydney to the nearest Antarctic coast, very little further from Sydney to Darwin. So far as the main concentration of the Australian population is concerned, those living south-­east of a line joining Brisbane and Adelaide, Antarctica is a closer

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 200

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctic geopolitics  201 neighbour than Asia.’14 This sense of nearness was replicated elsewhere in the southern hemisphere, especially in the public and political cultures of three other claimant states: Argentina, Chile, and New Zealand. But it also serves as a cultural as well as a geographical register. Serving one might argue to divorce Australia and Australians from Asia and Asians, and indirectly extenuating the connections, both imaginative and genealogical, with Britain and its dominions. As was well understood by the mid-­to late 1950s, the geopolitics of the Antarctic was contested.15 This was not just a representational struggle – a battle of rival geopolitical imaginations and lines on the polar map. It was also a battle over things and practices. In the 1940s, Britain, Argentina, Chile, and the United States were undertaking a series of activities that required men and objects – such as aircraft planes, flags, base huts, and helicopters – to perform mapping, charting, photographing, and dwelling in the Antarctic. Antarctic geopolitics was embodied, performance-­based, and affective in the sense that those actions and movements across polar land, sea, and sky were designed to inspire and reassure distant capitals that their respective countries’ interests were being enhanced in the process.16 Antarctic geopolitics, therefore, was something that was made and re-­made, and the capacity for surprise and uncertainty was never far away. The physical agency of the Antarctic itself meant that ships got lost, planes were grounded due to bad weather, and signs of human ‘effective occupation’ could be literally blown away by wind and snow.17 In 1948, a British civil servant based in Argentina named Bill Hunter Christie published a book called The Antarctic Problem.18 Apart from an apt title, it captured the polar zeitgeist, reviewing the past in order to speculate on a possible polar future punctuated by rising tension and territorial competition. By the late 1940s, seven states were claimants to the polar continent and surrounding ocean – Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway, and the UK. As the list suggests, on the face of it some states were considerably closer in geodetic terms to the Antarctic than others. For the four ‘southern’ states, their Antarctic territories were represented as integral parts of their national territory with ports and cities, such as Adelaide, Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, and Wellington, imagined as polar ‘gateways’. Argentina, Britain, and Chile were overlapping claimants. In the same year that Hunter Christie penned his reflections on Antarctic sovereignty politics, President Gabriel González Videla of Chile made a visit to the Chilean Antarctic Territory in the midst of the first Chilean Antarctic Expedition (1947–8). He went there explicitly to endorse a Chilean Antarctic claim and officially opened the recently constructed base, the General Bernardo O’Higgins station. As he noted in his inauguration speech, ‘To all in Chile, which I am certain is dwelling on this memorable act, I award this land of tomorrow, sure that its people will know how to maintain energetically the sovereignty and unity of our territory from Arica [in the far north of Chile close to the Bolivian/Peru borderlands] to the South Pole.’19 In so doing, he became the world’s first head of state to visit Antarctica and the first to urge his fellow citizens to commit to the task of protecting Chilean Antarctic territory in the name of tomorrow. Named after the hero of nineteenth-­century Chilean independence, the O’Higgins station was a reminder of how the Chilean political and military establishment viewed Antarctica as a frontier space of Chilean territorial nationalism, and one that had an anticipatory geopolitical dimension. Starting with legal and political decrees, Chilean authorities assembled documents, speeches, books, maps, materials, scientists, infrastructure, and even the body

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 201

21/12/2016 10:11

202  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica of the president to anticipate possible challenges to their polar sovereignty. Ever since a presidential decree from November 1940, the Chilean national territory was defined as the area between 53 degrees longitude west and 90 degrees longitude west including ‘all lands, islands, reefs, glaciers, and pack ice, and others, known or unknown, and the respective territorial sea’. The Chilean Antarctic Territory was enrolled into the provincial administrative structure and said to be part of ‘Magellan and Chilean Antarctica’ with the capital based in Port Williams. And new generations of school children were educated, via geography and history lessons, into understanding that their country inherited its southerly territories from imperial Spain and a fifteenth-­century papal decree, and thus it was reasonable for the country to extend beyond the southerly point of South America. Chilean military geographers such as Canas Montalva vigorously advanced this new Chilean geopolitical imagination, which envisioned a country no longer constrained by the mountainous geographies of the Andes and the South American coastline with the Pacific Ocean. In the Chilean journal, Revista Geografia de Chile, Montalva and colleagues such as Pedro Ihl were tireless advocates of Chilean Antarctic Territory and the role that Chile must play in defending its interests, albeit in a Cold War era where the United States and its Latin American allies were ever eager to strengthen hemispheric solidarity in the face of anxieties about the challenge posed by the Soviet Union. In the view expressed by the Chilean Foreign Minister Alberto Sepulveda in February 1958, ‘There is an American Antarctica, which is an integral part of the western hemisphere . . . The Antarctic territory of Chile is part of the security zone [as defined by the 1947 Rio Treaty of Inter-­American Reciprocal Assistance] . . . Our country holds the oldest rights of sovereignty on this territory, as established in the first place by repeated provisions and mandates from Spain and then later, through our life as a Republic.’20 In this more expansive era, Chile was a self-­declared ‘maritime and polar state’ whereby its outer limits would stretch over vast areas of the Pacific and the Antarctic continent. In this new vista, Chile would extend all the way to the South Pole itself mindful of how that geographical stretching fitted into Cold War regional security architectures. As Article 4 of the 1947 Rio Treaty notes: The region to which this Treaty refers is bounded as follows: beginning at the North Pole; thence due south to a point 74 degrees north latitude, 10 degrees west longitude; thence by a rhumb line to a point 47 degrees 30 minutes north latitude, 50 degrees west longitude; thence by a rhumb line to a point 35 degrees north latitude, 60 degrees west longitude; thence due south to a point in 20 degrees north latitude; thence by a rhumb line to a point 5 degrees north latitude, 24 degrees west longitude; thence due south to the South Pole; thence due north to a point 30 degrees south latitude, 90 degrees west longitude; thence by a rhumb line to a point on the Equator at 97 degrees west longitude; thence by a rhumb line to a point 15 degrees north latitude, 120 degrees west longitude; thence by a rhumb line to a point 50 degrees north latitude, 170 degrees east longitude; thence due north to a point in 54 degrees north latitude; thence by a rhumb line to a point 65 degrees 30 minutes north latitude, 168 degrees 58 minutes 5 seconds west longitude: thence due north to the North Pole.

So, in short, a combination of imperial inheritance, geographical proximity, and Cold War geopolitical alliance-­building combined to inculcate a passionate commitment to the notion that Chile extended southwards and eastwards. These appeals to geographical proximity and geological continuity, which Argentine geopolitical thinkers also noted approvingly, were powerful factors in making this vision

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 202

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctic geopolitics  203 compelling, at least to Chilean and Argentine citizens. Argentina and Chile found common geopolitical cause when it came to their polar territories and advocated a distinct sector called the ‘South American Antarctic’ in 1948, which could usefully distinguish itself from their counter-­claimant and imperial rival, the UK. It also helped to solidify Antarctic geopolitics. Maps and books, coupled with claims to proximity and continuity helped to buttress the inherently lively and unpredictable qualities of living and working let alone claiming territory in the Antarctic itself – one might describe that as a particular ‘Antarctic problem’.21 But the ‘Antarctic problem’ that Hunter Christie posited pivoted around the notion that three states claimed the same area of the Antarctic as part of their national territory (Argentina, Chile, and the UK), and others such as the United States and then later the Soviet Union were not inclined to grant any recognition to those prior claims. It is worth noting that the UK could also appeal to geographical proximity as well as past historical connections. If Chile and Argentina could point to an ‘imperial inheritance’ from Spain, a papal decree that declared that half of the world could be explored and conquered by the Spanish monarchy, then Britain could point to a historical association with Antarctica stretching over two centuries. If Argentina and Chile could point to geographical proximity then the UK could look to its occupation of the Falkland Islands and South Georgia and cite these islands as ‘polar gateways’. What gave Antarctic geopolitics zest in the 1950s, moreover, as Andrews recognized, was that other southern hemispheric countries (namely Australia and New Zealand) were also eager to capitalize and materialize upon their national visions of incorporated polar domains. Australia (1933) and New Zealand (1923) were claimants to extensive polar territories, the Australian Antarctic Territory (AAT) and the Ross Dependency respectively. All four southern countries invoked terms such as geographical proximity, geographical fate, geographical fact, polar gateway and geological connection to make manifest their sense of themselves as natural and durable polar nations, and all four were committed to ensuring that their citizens were enrolled in these national visions. For Australia, the decade leading up to Andrews’s ruminations on ‘Antarctic ­geopolitics’ was a busy one. In 1947, the Department of External Affairs established an Antarctic Division.22 The decision to create the new division was more than simply an administrative indulgence. It was predicated on the appreciation that Australia’s substantial polar claim had not been strengthened since the introduction of an administrative act of formal incorporation in 1933. As with other claimants, the post-­1945 era ushered into existence a great need to perform ‘Antarctic geopolitics’. In other words, articulating territorial visions while necessary would have to be matched increasingly by active labour and deeds. If Chile could muster expeditions and a presidential visit then what might others have to offer in their quest to find ways to consolidate territorial claims. The Australian cabinet agreed in 1947 to fund new expeditions and base building projects incorporating sub-­ Antarctic islands and the AAT. Even in 1948, Australian officials were already warning government ministers that the southern fringes of Australia might be vulnerable to rocket attacks by hostile forces. Antarctic geopolitics in this rendition were changing, and changing fast. Cold War geopolitical imaginations were transforming Antarctica. Growing interest from the superpowers in the governance arrangements for the polar continent, in combination with the imaginative and material power of rockets and missiles, helped to transform and

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 203

21/12/2016 10:11

204  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica complicate the meaning of words like ‘proximity’. For southern hemispheric nationalists, it was a term to imprint into the imaginations of citizens who needed to know and feel an affinity for these southerly territories – recognizing them as part of their national territories even if they never visited them.23 While proximity offered connection and integration, it also raised the less appealing prospect of how others might take advantage if they could establish themselves in comparatively nearby Antarctic spaces. Richard Casey, the Australian Foreign Minister, confided to the Canadian High Commissioner in Canberra that ‘We do not want the Russians to mount installations in the Antarctic from which they can drop missiles on Melbourne or Sydney.’24 That remark was made in 1957 the same year Andrews was penning his thoughts on Antarctic geopolitics. Timing was everything. The period between 1947 and 1957 was highly significant in shaping an anticipatory Antarctic geopolitics. Claimant states, southern and northern hemispheric alike, watched anxiously as others mustered their imaginative and material resources. The role of the superpowers was foundational as they had the resources to move about, to settle in and even to imagine different Antarctic futures. The United States was instrumental in proposing the IGY and in leading the negotiations over the future governance of the Antarctic. The Soviet Union (and in a more modest role India) was resolute in ensuring that it was not excluded from any international scientific and political enterprises affecting the polar continent. Australian anxieties only increased when it became apparent that the Soviet Union, as part of its IGY polar programme, was determined to establish scientific stations in the AAT. Whatever its private reservations, the Australian government was in no position to protest about this concentration of scientific power. Under the terms and conditions of the IGY, this veritable ‘scientific Olympics’ was to be devoid of concerns about who claimed which part of the Antarctic as their national territory. Painful as it might have been, the latest iteration of Antarctic geopolitics in 1957 was one in which scientific internationalism, Cold War geopolitics and territorial nationalism made for awkward bedfellows. As a physical setting for all of this, the material geographies of the Antarctic were anything but inert. The ice and snow themselves were enrolled in these geopolitical articulations. What could be buried under ice? Could rockets be secretly installed and launched? Were submarines secretly patrolling the ice-­filled waters off the polar continent? As with the Arctic region, journalists and politicians alike were quite capable of investing tremendous possibilities for intrigue and suspicion. It was not just charlatans and conspiracy theorists at work here. Respectable newspapers, such as the New York Times in September 1959, were quite capable of imagining a world where the Soviet Union would need to be prevented from turning the Antarctic into a ‘Soviet Albania’ and using it to establish launch pads which might imperil the entire southern hemisphere.25 Andrews, by way of contrast, was quite modest when it came to imagining what geopolitical future might materialize in Antarctica. The negotiations leading to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty were painstaking and, at times, verged on collapse because of competing futures. Cold War fears of Soviet intrigue combined with claimant state intransigence were prominent in this, as was suspicion of the United States and what it ‘wanted’ from the Antarctic. In other words, a variety of geopolitical ‘demands’ were being hastily assembled in the late 1950s – there were demanding actors who did not want to be excluded from any governance negotiations, there were demanding issues that were considered to be crucial for some parties, there were imaginative demands, and there were hopeful demands that ‘science’ would provide

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 204

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctic geopolitics  205 a necessary consensus. As the US State Department official Henry Dater noted, ‘Because of its leadership in the Free World, it is evident that the United States could not now withdraw from the Antarctic . . . Antarctica simply cannot be separated from the global matrix. Science is the shield behind which these activities are carried out.’26 The Antarctic Treaty negotiations were as much a scientific-­legal intervention as they were geopolitical and future-­orientated. At stake was something both imaginative and material – how to imagine what the polar continent could be like, and how to practice geopolitics in the face of an uncertain future? What could be anticipated and could unwelcome futures (for example, the Antarctic as Cold War battleground, as nuclear testing site, as resource free-­for-­all) be avoided?

DEFERRING ANTARCTIC GEOPOLITICS The signing of the Antarctic Treaty on 1 December 1959 is often taken to be a landmark event that transformed Antarctic geopolitics in the sense that it provided an overall framework for the original signatories to find a way forward through territorial accommodation and scientific exchange. The period of ratification was not straightforward, however. Claimant states such as Argentina and Chile were slower to endorse than others and, in large part, this revolved around a reluctance to embrace a treaty regime that appeared to defer their territorial nationalisms.27 The treaty intervened in the ‘foreseeable future’ and the negotiators in Washington DC determined which things and objects could be foreseen. Article 4 of the Antarctic Treaty, which places to one side the thorny issue of the territorial sovereignty of Antarctica, was designed to defer an unwelcome future – a future whereby the superpowers and claimant states contested, perhaps violently, matters of possession, dispossession, and non-­possession. The apparent neglect of natural resources in the treaty negotiations was deliberate in the sense that the issue itself was considered to be politically toxic and likely to inflame the already sensitive issue of sovereignty. So by intervening in one area (deferring conflict over territorial sovereignty) it was hoped that another area (conflict over resources both living and non-­living) could be avoided. Thus what is interesting about the Antarctic Treaty and what followed from it is its relationship to ‘Antarctic futures’. The role of anticipation was crucial as signatories were engaged in various mechanisms to defer, to prepare, and even pre-­empt uncertainties and threats to the treaty and to Antarctica itself. Acting in anticipatory ways was, and indeed still is, an integral part of Antarctic geopolitics, as a way of shaping that very future. In the face of persistent uncertainty over territorial sovereignty, such active anticipation is a necessary pre-­condition for regime survival. But addressing those qualms, including future uncertainties, has not always been a shared project. Claimant states, for example, held views of Antarctica conditioned by their senses of geographical proximity, historic connections, and inalienable legal rights. When the original signatories assembled a preamble to the Antarctic Treaty, it appealed to a recent past and a shared future vision prefaced by the use of the words ‘shall’ and ‘will’: Recognizing that it is in the interest of all mankind that Antarctica shall continue for ever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes and shall not become the scene or object of international discord;

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 205

21/12/2016 10:11

206  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Acknowledging the substantial contributions to scientific knowledge resulting from international cooperation in scientific investigation in Antarctica; Convinced that the establishment of a firm foundation for the continuation and development of such cooperation on the basis of freedom of scientific investigation in Antarctica as applied during the International Geophysical Year accords with the interests of science and the progress of all mankind; Convinced also that a treaty ensuring the use of Antarctica for peaceful purposes only and the continuance of international harmony in Antarctica will further the purposes and principles embodied in the Charter of the United Nations.28

The deferral of the Antarctic geopolitics of the 1950s was achieved by two primary mechanisms – regime development and ‘treaty sovereignty’. The first was achieved through the regime development epitomized by the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS). As the treaty parties developed a basic governing architecture, including a future-­facing assemblage of biennial meetings, scientific networks, and regular interchange between officials, it helped to order spatially and manage temporally the Antarctic region. Legal instruments such as conventions and shared agreements over resources (such as seals, fish, and even a deferred one on mineral resources) helped to consolidate claims to solidarities and articulations of authority, as well as generating shared understandings of the Antarctic itself. A growing membership, including representatives from China, India, and Brazil, in a short period of time in the 1980s, was a particularly important development in deferring visions of a continent caught up in a new era of resource-­driven geopolitical intrigue. Geographical understandings of Antarctica were significant in this context. In the immediate aftermath of the Antarctic Treaty negotiations, it was not uncommon to regard the polar continent as a ‘frozen laboratory’. A conceit that not only under-­estimated the physical agency of the Antarctic but also viewed science as an overwhelmingly palliative presence – an assemblage of agents, ideas, objects, and practices, which enabled international goodwill and exchange.29 Former British scientist and director of the British Antarctic Survey Richard Laws was not untypical in claiming that ‘Scientific activities are relatively non-­controversial as had been demonstrated during the International Geophysical Year to defuse sovereignty issues.’30 There was a presumption that science in the post-­Antarctic Treaty era would be able to defuse and indeed defer the more dystopian variants of future Antarctic geopolitics. This sense of defusing sovereignty issues was sorely tested in the 1960s and 1970s when it became clear that the Antarctic was not a ‘frozen laboratory’ per se. It was, for many parties, a lively place filled with potential both in the here and now and in the future. Interest in the region’s resource potential led to new regime developments including the Convention on the Conservation on Marine Living Resources (CCMALR, 1980) and the deferred Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities (CRAMRA 1982–1988), which ultimately failed to secure the necessary support of the Treaty Consultative Parties. Regardless of their fate, these conventions coupled with growing interest from third parties in the ‘future of Antarctica’ revealed the challenges facing the ATS itself. While it had proven adept at deferring the Antarctic geopolitics of the 1950s, the ATS was facing unprecedented challenges about how to respond to the future. It was, of course, impossible to predict future outcomes precisely. But for those interested parties, seeking to consolidate and indeed preserve the ATS, the awareness of contingency, shock, and

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 206

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctic geopolitics  207 uncertainty underwrote calls to develop these new conventions in the hope of providing a framework for regulating a resourceful rather than scientific Antarctica. The introduction of the conventions was indicative of strategic calculation and imagination; an attempt to anticipate and defer possible conflict in the future. While the CRAMRA negotiations (1982–1988) ultimately floundered because two of the lead negotiators (Australia and France) abandoned plans to develop a future-­orientated regime for resource exploitation and revenue sharing, the then New Zealand-­based chief negotiator, Chris Beeby, was clear in his own mind what was at stake: The single most important stimulus towards agreed rules was the common judgment that their absence might one day lead to a revival, in a very acute and unmanageable form, of the dispute about sovereignty put aside by Article IV of and that this could in turn severely undermine the Treaty and even lead to its collapse. That judgment – that rules are needed, that the gap in the Treaty should be filled – still represents common ground.31

So the revival of an earlier form of Antarctic geopolitics was the stimulus, in Beeby’s judgment at least, for CRAMRA as a future-­orientated intervention – a measure designed to defer the worst possible future (for example, unregulated mining and inter-­state ­conflict) by invoking one where resource exploitation would unfold in a rules-­based and pacific framework. For others, of course, this future vision was anything but hopeful. Environmental organizations, such as Greenpeace, were highly active in contesting this vision of the Antarctic as resource space and mobilized geographical counter-­imaginaries emphasizing a future based on Antarctic wilderness. Their vision was one of permanent deferral, in other words, where mineral resource exploitation would never occur in the future. Creative practices and interventions such as images of rusty oil drums, scenario planning, and public protesting were vital in moving and mobilizing others to embrace their future visions. In the midst of that turmoil, growing interest by Third World states such as China, India, and Malaysia further inflamed the representational struggles over how to understand Antarctica – was it a world park, a resource base, a scientific laboratory, a fishing ground, or a legacy of past colonialisms and imperialisms? The introduction and eventual entry into force of the Protocol on Environmental Protection in 1998 was an instrument of deferral. As with the Antarctic Treaty, the ban was a mechanism for deferring and blocking unwanted futures. While the measures agreed under the Protocol can be revisited and possibly rescinded if there is sufficient support from the parties concerned, the specific ban on mining activities, under Article 7, was intended to defer a more immediate and unwelcome future – the collapse of the ATS itself. The decision by Australia and France to walk away from the CRAMRA negotiations was widely ‘felt’ to be ushering into existence possible ruination of the ATS. Eager to rebuild political consensus and revitalize the governance architecture, the Protocol negotiations were some of the most testing in the system’s history. For the seven claimant states and the two semi-­claimants (the Soviet Union and the United States), Article IV was a deferral and not a denial of their future sovereign interests in Antarctica. The term ‘treaty sovereignty’ was used to describe a situation whereby the parties concerned explored a variety of agents, sites, and objects to consolidate their national imaginaries. In Argentina and Chile, for example, in the midst of speculation about Antarctica’s growing resource potential, pregnant women were flown down to Antarctic bases so that they could give birth to children in Antarctica. Building ­genealogical and

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 207

21/12/2016 10:11

208  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica geopolitical connections with the continent, one might say, in the natal and post-­natal process. The use of pregnant women as geopolitical agents was a notable intervention in a place where women had largely been excluded and marginalized.32 The sites of Antarctic geopolitics extended beyond the Antarctic. While the research station helped to consolidate an occupying presence, the school, the museum, and the library were also noteworthy in archiving, educating, and displaying Antarctic nationalisms. In 1992, Chile exported a piece of Antarctic ice to the EXPO in Seville as part of a national exhibition about the country and its diverse ecosystems and landscapes. As one author noted: The decision to search for ice from Antarctica reflects nationalist pride in the territory that dates back to the late 1940s. In February 1948, President Gabriel González Videla refused to minimize the importance of the claimed land and stated that it was necessary to ‘defend the sovereignty and unity of our territory, from Arica to the South Pole’. On May 10 of the previous year, to commemorate the claim and reinforce expressions of national identity to celebrate Chile’s ice-­ covered noncontiguous territory, Correos de Chile issued two postage stamps that depicted the country’s Antarctic terrain. The stamps conveyed a simple yet powerful message: Despite the ongoing territorial disputes, Chile owned a piece of Antarctica according to Decree No. 1747, issued on November 6, 1940.33

As scholars such as Jack Child remind us, postage stamps in South America and beyond were important geopolitical objects, as banal reminders of Antarctic territories past, present, and also future.34 What ‘treaty sovereignty’ allowed for was a spatial and temporal deferral. On one hand, it meant that claimant states such as Australia, Chile, and the UK deferred anxieties of dispossession by re-­possessing their territories in the realm of the imaginative and ­material; by incorporating them into the realm of public education on the one hand and on the other by building and maintaining scientific stations. It also facilitated a future-­ orientated intervention with one of the most obvious being the education of young children in the public education system, thus ensuring that as adults they were inculcated with a sense of how important it was to understand their respective nations as ‘polar’. The work of the Argentine political scientist, Carlos Escudé, remains invaluable in highlighting how forms of ‘patriotic education’ doctrines combined with map drawing, scrapbook making and the collection of stamps contributed to the making of the young Argentine citizen in the here and now and the ‘geographically informed’ citizen of the future.35

RESILIENT ANTARCTIC GEOPOLITICS Resilience, used frequently in national security planning and disaster management, is in the eyes of many analysts one of the most important contemporary political categories. With its roots in ecological thought, resilience implies a capacity to ‘bounce back’ from a current (and possibly unwelcome) state to a previous state. The catalyst for such resilience is often said to be evident in the aftermath of a crisis or trauma such as a natural disaster or terrorist attack. What makes resilience appealing to political leaders, moreover, is the sense that it stands in contra-­distinction to fragility. Resilience is also an imaginative process. It embraces a strategic culture of preparedness, which embraces the prospect of the emergency in order to better prepare for something that might happen, but also might not. As Mark Neocleous contends,

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 208

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctic geopolitics  209 Resilience is nothing if not an apprehension of the future, but a future imagined as disaster and then, more importantly, recovery from the disaster. In this task resilience plays heavily on its origins in systems thinking, explicitly linking security with urban planning, civil contingency measures, public health, financial institutions, corporate risk and the environment in a way that had previously been incredibly hard for the state to do.36

For the seven claimant states, the future imagined as disaster might be a world where their territorial claims were dismissed with little to no thought for the apparent consequences. In a world where the provisions of the Antarctic Treaty no longer applied, the geopolitical holding pattern of the last six decades would be no more. Semi-­claimants such as Russia and the United States might formally articulate and implement de facto territorial claims and third parties, state and non-­state alike, might decide that existing prohibitions on mining might no longer apply. A new colonizing impulse might be unleashed with a variety of actors engaging in their own space-­making projects, oblivious to calls for consensus and restraint in mineral resource activities, fishing, military testing, and so on. While popular authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Matthew Reilly have imagined an Antarctica punctured by mining operations and/or riddled by conflict, claimant states frequently invoke the prospect of disaster or crisis to provoke domestic and international audiences.37 In Australia, for example, Chinese research stations being established in the AAT in conjunction with Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean has provoked commentators to claim that sovereignty over the AAT is in jeopardy. In both cases, notwithstanding the presence of the ATS and relevant actors such as the International Whaling Commission, well-­placed Australian writers were not shy in imagining disastrous futures. Ellie Fogarty of the Lowy Institute for International Policy speculated on the following in 2011: Major powers such as China and Russia have voiced their interest in the continent’s resource potential, strongly suggesting the current prohibition of resource exploitation will be revisited after 2048. These developments pose a potential threat to the longevity of the Antarctic Treaty System as well as Australia’s dormant claim to 42% of the continent. Australia has limited Antarctic presence and capability, and posits its policy in terms of science and environmental management rather than national security. This raises questions about its ability to preserve its sovereignty claim.38

In other words, the last sentence of the quote frames it as a question of resilience. What can the claimant state do to ‘preserve its sovereignty claim’ in the face of a looming disaster? The disaster being, presumably, Russia and China’s decision to revoke the prohibition on mining in 2048 onwards – the point when the provisions of the Protocol on Environmental Protection could be reviewed and possibly annulled. More worryingly, however, is the implicit suggestion that major powers such as China might just ‘walk away’ if the ATS no longer suited their purposes. Other Australian authors have considered the consequences that might follow if countries such as China continue to expand their presence in the Antarctic. As Bergin and Press contend: Australia is a major player in Antarctic affairs, but others’ efforts might overtake us soon. If we’re to maintain our significant influence on the frozen continent, it’s essential that we expand our ability to conduct high quality science, extend the presence that allows for that science to be

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 209

21/12/2016 10:11

210  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica supported, and grow the logistic capability to deliver and support science . . . Other countries have superior capacity to penetrate our territory, and so they do.39

This fear of ‘penetration’, with all its fears of unwanted and gendered violation, is a recurring motif in contemporary Australian geopolitical imagination, provoking in turn a cultural reaction that has been termed ‘frontier vigilantism’.40 As Ellie Fogarty noted, ‘Greater occupation, and the ability to access all of its claimed territory will make it less difficult for Australia to argue its case for sovereignty in the future.’41 One response by claimant states such as Australia has been to invest in a more resilient form of Antarctic geopolitics by promoting themselves as coastal states and advocating greater resourcing to extending their presence both above and below sea level.42 Drawing inspiration from Article 76 and 77 of the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS) and provisions for extended continental shelf delimitation, Australia and others have invested considerably in mapping and charting the continental shelf regions of their territorial claims in Antarctica and surrounding sub-­Antarctic islands. It is a contentious business, as the vast majority of the international community would not register the presence of coastal states in Antarctica. The relationship between UNCLOS (which came into force in 1994) and the Antarctic Treaty is a work in progress.43 It has created opportunities for states with claims to Antarctic coastline, such as Australia, Argentina, and the UK, to collect scientific data about their continental shelf regions and consider submitting materials to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS), which in turn helps to adjudicate on whether a coastal state enjoys further sovereign rights over the seabed pertaining to the extended continental shelf. This is a complex, time-­consuming, and expensive business; and thus far none of the claimant/coastal states concerned (with the exception of Argentina) have asked the CLCS to consider their respective Antarctic extended continental shelves. Their deferral is rooted in caution – a concern that to take an active position would be seen as provocative to other parties to the ATS which believe that land and sea-­based claims to territory should be deferred for the duration of the treaty and its provisions.44 This deferral, however, is complicit with a resilient Antarctic geopolitics. In other words, there is a conviction that any collapse in the ATS can be mitigated and even recovered from if information on extended continental shelves is archived and stored. When Australia presented its submission in 2004 to the CLCS, it was publicly noted that they asked the UN body not to consider their materials pertaining to the AAT. It was a deliberate partial submission, but one which reserved the right to submit further materials in due course. As with other claimant states such as Chile, New Zealand, and the UK, this partial submission strategy was an exercise in preparedness. What might the claimant/coastal state do in the event of the collapse of the ATS? The answer appeared to be it would submit further materials to the CLCS in the hope, if not expectation, that this UN body might issue non-­binding ‘recommendations’ which would help to bolster a sense of de facto territorial sovereignty over the Antarctic seabed. In reality, the CLCS is a ­scientific–technical body with no legal competence, but, nonetheless, the hope appears to lie in this body to grant an imprimatur of sorts.45 A further vignette illustrative of another form of resilient Antarctic geopolitics lies in the bilateral relationship between Argentina and Britain. Both countries have faced the prospect of the relationship turning towards disaster, never more so than from April

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 210

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctic geopolitics  211 to June 1982 when the fate of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands hung in the balance. Since those hostilities, both countries have been engaged in a ‘proxy war’ in and around the sub-­Antarctic islands of the Falklands and South Georgia, clashing over defence, fishing, oil and gas exploration, and tourism. The 2013 referendum in the Falkland Islands was another moment of geopolitical tension as voters overwhelmingly expressed support for a political future shaped by a constitutional relationship with the UK. Both countries have invested strongly in building and maintaining political relationships with other South American states such as Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. In 2012, a situation of a different kind that many took as a looming disaster provoked a renewed interest in how resilient the UK’s Antarctic presence might be in the future. The source of this anxiety was the decision by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), a major British funding body, to propose a merger between the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the National Oceanography Centre. What followed was an intense period of media and parliamentary scrutiny, with supporters of BAS contending that any merger would weaken the UK’s capacity not only to conduct polar science (as a result of rationalization of resources) but also to act as a high-­profile geopolitical agent in a contested region of Antarctica. The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee concluded that the proposed merger was misguided. The merger was subsequently abandoned and the future of BAS as a stand-­alone institution reaffirmed by the then Science Minister, David Willetts. Two months later, the then Foreign Secretary, William Hague, stood in front of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and announced that a large part of British Antarctic Territory would be renamed Queen Elizabeth Land in honour of the Queen’s fiftieth Jubilee Year.46 While the objects of anxiety vary from Australian worries about Chinese activities on the polar continent to the naming practices of the UK in the face of geopolitical competition from Argentina, these vignettes hint at a collective concern for preparedness and resilience. How can the claimant state make itself more resilient in a world where Antarctic geopolitics appears to be more riddled with arguments over scientific whaling, fisheries management, and the establishment of marine protection areas in the Southern Ocean?47 China, Russia, and the Ukraine are routinely cited as examples of non-­claimant states who are eager to exploit Antarctica in the here and now (fish) and in the future (minerals). In Australia, the government released an independent plan for Australia’s policy options over the next twenty years in Antarctica in late 2014. For two Australian academics, the report was welcome because, As explained above, others countries do have their eyes focused on Antarctica. Should a non-­ party to the Treaty arrive on the continent with non-­scientific or non-­peaceful intentions, then it is likely politics and international customary law will be used to prevent that non-­party taking any actions that were contrary to the spirit and intent of the Treaty. In the most unlikely event that the Treaty should end, then any rival claimant will need to submit to a competitive process with Australia, bettering its long-­standing history of effective occupation. Broader, untested arguments of common heritage aside, it is unlikely that another country could defeat Australia’s claim.48

Or so it is hoped, at least.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 211

21/12/2016 10:11

212  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

CONCLUSIONS This chapter has considered how Antarctic geopolitics might be considered explicitly through the logic of anticipation and whether it might be possible to imagine three ­variants – characterized by anticipation, deferral, and resilience. In each case, the relationship to the future is critical in driving ideas and actions in the proverbial here and now.49 For interested parties in the 1950s, there was a hopeful future in which international collaboration might be possible through science and scientists; which if sufficiently robust might anticipate another possible future involving further territorial claiming by the superpowers, nuclear testing and dumping, secret Soviet missile launch sites and the intensification of Cold War geopolitics, and conflict over strategic stores of minerals such as uranium.50 Contemporaries had imagined that all of these scenarios were imminently possible. The Antarctic Treaty was about deferring those aforementioned futures and deliberately did not seek to resolve the toughest issues, such as ownership of natural resources and territory. Finally, the chapter identified a resilient form of Antarctic geopolitics, with an attendant interest in how the ATS has coped with ‘shocks’ and its capacity to ‘bounce back’ from hints of unwelcome futures including conflict over fishing, marine management, and scientific whaling. As the Antarctic becomes subject to ever greater demands to better manage, regulate, and understand it, so too will it become ever more important to understand how Antarctic geopolitics mutates in the present and in the future.

NOTES   1.   2.   3.   4.   5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Andrews 1957. Hartshorne 1954. Roucek 1951; Child 1979. Howkins 2008; 2011. Rozwadowski 2012; Turchetti and Roberts 2014. Naylor et al 2008. Andrews 1957, 4. Chaturvedi 1990; 2013. Joyner 1992; 2008. Andrews 1957, 3 (emphasis added). Dodds and Nuttall 2015. Toal 1996. Swan 1961, but also compare Griffiths 2008. Andrews 1957, 6. Chaturvedi 1996; Rothwell 1996; and Brady 2014. Dodds 2002. Cosgrove and della Dora 2008. Hunter Christie 1951. Dodds 1997, 115 (emphasis added). Dodds 1997, 116. Escude 1992. Swan 1961. As Collis (2009) reminds us, vistation was profoundly gendered; women were excluded from Antarctic national programmes in the 1950s and 1960s. Dodds 1997. Beck 1986. Beck 1986, 64–5. Howkins 2008. Antarctic Treaty 1959.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 212

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctic geopolitics  213 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Herr and Hall 1989. Laws 1987, 250. Beeby 1991, 18–19. Collis 2009. Korowin 2010, 53. Child 2008. Escudé 1992. Neocleous 2013, 3. Robinson (1997) and O’Reilly (2008) and more generally Leane (2015). Fogarty 2011. Bergin and Press 2011. Dodds and Hemmings 2009. Fogarty 2011, 11. Kriwoken, Jabour, and Hemmings 2007. Hemmings, Rothwell, and Scott 2012. Powell and Dodds 2014. Saul and Stephens 2015. Dodds 2014. Hemmings, Rothwell and Scott 2012. Hodgson-­Johnstone and Jabour 2014. Ali and Pincus 2015. Watt 2013.

REFERENCES Ali, S. and Pincus, B. (eds) 2015. Diplomacy on Ice: Energy and the Environment. New Haven CT: Yale University Press. Andrews, J. 1957. Antarctic geopolitics. Australian Outlook 11(3): 3–9. The Antarctic Treaty, 1959. Antarctic Treaty, 1 December, available at: http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/about_antarctica/geopolitical/treaty/update_1959.php. Beck, P. 1986. International Politics of Antarctica. London: St Martin’s Press. Beeby, C. 1991. The Antarctic Treaty System: goals, performance and impact. In A. Jorgensen-­Dahl, A. and Ostreng, W. (eds), The Antarctic Treaty System in World Politics. London: Macmillan. Bergin. A. and Press, T. 2011. Action need to cement role in Antarctica. The Age. 1 September, available at: http://newsstore.fairfax.com.au/apps/viewDocument.ac;jsessionid=CC0F255F47B7231C3FDFACCB604 D13B2?page=1&sy=afr&kw=aurora&pb=none&dt=selectRange&dr=1month&so=relevance&sf=text&sf= headline&rc=10&rm=200&sp=0&clsPage=1&docID=AGE110901PM2ES7EL8AM. Brady, A.-­M. 2014. The Emerging Politics of Antarctica. London: Routledge. Chaturvedi, S. 1990. The Dawning of Antarctica: A Geopolitical Analysis. New Delhi: Segment Books. Chaturvedi, S. 1996. The Polar Regions: A Political Geography. Chichester: John Wiley. Chaturvedi, S. 2013. Rise and decline of Antarctica in Nehru’s geopolitical vision: challenges and opportunities of the 1950s. Polar Journal 3(1): 301–15. Child, J. 1979. Geopolitical thinking in Latin America. Latin American Research Review 14(2): 89–111. Collis, C. 2009. The Australian Antarctic Territory: A man’s world? Signs 34(3): 514–19. Dodds, K. 1997. Geopolitics of Antarctica: Views from the Southern Ocean Rim. Chichester: John Wiley. Dodds, K. 2002. Pink Ice: Britain and the South Atlantic Empire. London: I.B. Tauris. Dodds, K. 2014. Queen Elizabeth Land. Polar Record 50(3): 330–3. Dodds, K. and Hemmings, A. 2009. Frontier vigilantism? Australia and contemporary representations of the Australian Antarctic Territory. Australian Journal of Politics and History 55(4): 513–29. Dodds, K. and Nuttall, M. 2015. The Scramble for the Poles: The Contemporary Geopolitics of the Arctic and Antarctic. Cambridge: Polity. Escudé, C. 1992. Education, Political Culture, and Foreign Policy: The Case of Argentina. Durham: Duke-­UNC Working Paper Series. Fogarty, E. 2011. Antarctica: Assessing and Protecting Australia’s National Interests. August, Sydney: Lowry Institute, available at: http://www.lowyinstitute.org/files/pubfiles/Fogarty,_Antarctica_web.pdf. Griffiths, T. 2008. Slicing the Silence. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Hartshorne, R. 1954. Political geography. Pages 211–14 in James, P. and Jones, C. (eds), American Geography. Syracuse: Syracuse NY: University Press.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 213

21/12/2016 10:11

214  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Hemmings, A, Rothwell, D., and Scott, K. (eds) 2012. Antarctic Security in the 21st Century. London: Routledge. Herr, R. and Hall, R. 1989. Science as currency and the currency of science. Pages 13–24 in Handmer, J. (ed.), Antarctica: Policies and Policy Development. Canberra: Australian National University. Hodgson-­Johnstone, I. and Jabour, J. 2014. Is Australia’s claim to Antarctica at risk? The Conversation. 16 October, available at: http://theconversation.com/is-­australias-­claim-­to-­antarctica-­at-­risk-­33074. Howkins, A. 2008. Reluctant collaborators: Argentina and Chile in Antarctica during the International Geophysical Year, 1957–58. Journal of Historical Geography 34(4): 596–617. Howkins, A. 2011. Melting empires? Climate change and politics in Antarctica since the International Geophysical Year. Osiris 26(1): 180–97. Hunter Christie, W. 1951. The Antarctic Problem. London: George Unwin and Sons. Joyner, C. 1992. Antarctica and the Law of the Sea. Dordrecht: Brill. Joyner, C. 1998. Governing the Frozen Commons: The Antarctic Regime and Environmental Protection. Columbia SC: University of South Carolina Press. Korowin, E. 2010. ‘Iceberg ahead!’ (Re)discovering Chile at the 1992 Universal Exposition in Seville, Spain. Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 28(1): 48–63. Kriwoken. L, Jabour, J. and Hemmings, A. (eds) 2007. Looking South: Australia’s Antarctic Agenda. Sydney: The Federation Press. Laws, R. 1987. Co-­operation or confrontation? Science, the Treaty and the future. Pages 250–65 in Walton, D. (ed.), Antarctic Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leane, E. 2015. Antarctica in Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Naylor, S., Siegert, M., Dean, K. and Turchetti, S. 2008. Science, geopolitics and the governance of Antarctica. Nature Geoscience 1(3): 143–5. Neocleous, M. 2013. Resisting resilience. Radical Philosophy 178 (March/April), available at: http://www.rad icalphilosophy.com/commentary/resisting-­resilience. O’Reilly, J. 2011. Tectonic history and Gondwanan geopolitics in the Larsemann Hills, Antarctica. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 34(2): 214–32. O’Reilly, M. 2008. Ice Station. London: Pan Macmillan. Powell, R. and Dodds, K. (eds) 2014. Polar Geopolitics: Knowledges, Legal Regimes and Resources. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Pyne, S. 1986. The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Robinson, K. 1997. Antarctica. New York: Bantam. Rothwell, D. 1996. The Polar Regions and the Development of International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roucek, J. 1951. Geopolitics of Antarctica and the Falkland Islands. World Affairs Interpreter 22(1): 44–56. Rozwadowski, H. 2012. Arthur C. Clarke and the limitations of the ocean as a frontier. Environmental History 17(3): 578–602. Saul, B. and Stephens, T. 2015. Antarctica in International Law. Oxford: Hart Books. Swan, R. 1961. Australia in the Antarctic. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Toal, G. 1996. Critical Geopolitics. London: Routledge. Turchetti, S. and Roberts, P. (eds) 2014. The Survelliance Imperative. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Watt, L.-­M. 2013. Return to Gondwanaland: South Africa, Antarctica, minerals and apartheid. Polar Journal 3(1): 72–93.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 214

21/12/2016 10:11

PART II ACTING IN AND BEYOND ANTARCTICA

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 215

21/12/2016 10:11

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 216

21/12/2016 10:11

14.  Establishing open rights in the Antarctic and outer space: Cold War rivalries and geopolitics in the 1950s and 1960s1 Roger D. Launius

INTRODUCTION It is almost a truism that the United States in the 1950s worked with the Soviet Union and other powers to ensure that both Antarctica and outer space became places where nations could operate unimpeded by national sovereignty issues. This first emerged in the mid-­1950s with efforts to ensure that pursuits undertaken as a result of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) in Antarctica were dedicated to the advance of scientific ­knowledge.2 A similar approach to dealing with the extremely important region of outer space was attained during the same period. The US’s ‘Open Skies’ doctrine, allowing all to operate unimpeded in outer space, proved effective in ensuring transit of civil, military, and commercial spacecraft of all varieties during the Cold War.3 But US efforts were part of a much larger endeavor to ensure free use of territory not already under an individual nation’s control. This effort emerged after World War II as traditional European colonial powers were forced to divest themselves of their territories and the longstanding – at least since 1500 – European hegemony began to wane. It was carried to its logical conclusion in Antarctica where individual sovereignty rights were circumscribed, and these same prerogatives were also extended into outer space. In the context of tense international rivalries and geopolitical power plays during the Cold War the curtailment of territorial rights proved a unique and interesting solution to the larger competition among the great powers.4 This strategy, which found ready acceptance among the principal protagonists of the Cold War, manifested itself in the creation of two path-­breaking treaties that have governed these cold and icy regimes to the present: the Antarctic Treaty (signed in 1959) and the Treaty on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (signed in 1967).5 At a fundamental level the IGY, the concern over Antarctica, the quest for ‘freedom of space’, and the Sputnik crisis of 1957 were all interrelated challenges in managing conflict in strikingly new harsh and extreme environments opened during the Cold War. They were handled by these rivals in an essentially similar manner, a structure that has survived for more than half a century. Both treaties, and their ancillary governing conventions, were predicated on the belief that nothing of intrinsic value was present either in Antarctica or in outer space. At present both of these legal structures are fragile instruments and under persistent assault from several quarters, especially by military and commercial interests. Interpretations of the governance of outer space and Antarctica have ranged from idealistic – extreme regions that have been dedicated to science in which geopolitics are subverted to the quest for knowledge – to a cynical perspective that argues that Cold War geopolitics drove all decisions and subverted everything else to state security ends and 217

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 217

21/12/2016 10:11

218  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica international rivalries. This paper will survey the history of governance in Antarctica and outer space and compare decisions affecting outer space and Antarctica in the 1950s and 1960s. It suggests that a middle interpretation in which geopolitics and science are interwoven is the most appropriate entrée to understanding this complex history.6

INCURSION INTO ANTARCTICA The first recorded instances of Western investigation of Antarctica, Terra Australis Incognita – the unknown southern land – may be traced to the voyages of the British Captain James Cook who sailed into the region briefly in the eighteenth century.7 During this time establishment of territorial claims on Antarctica created a morass of conflicting, overlapping, and endlessly contested titles on various parts of the continent. In the decade after World War II international intrigue and geopolitical rivalry sparked intense disagreements over Antarctica, and on more than one occasion the potential for violence arose.8 When added to the Cold War rivalry of the United States and the Soviet Union, the result was a sort of stalemate over governance and usage. Historian Dian O. Belanger has made the case that two central issues changed the situation in Antarctica in the 1950s: The first was the swift postwar descent into a tense and terrifying cold war: for example, Europe divided by the Iron Curtain; Communist expansion in Asia; and, especially, the nuclear arms race . . . The second result was that science . . . emerged from the conflict with enormous prestige and political influence.9

The emergence of this situation created an environment in which the longstanding paradigm that had dominated Antarctic activities until this time could no longer be sustained. The Cold War propelled the necessity of action; international scientific pursuits offered a benign means of doing so.

ENTER THE INTERNATIONAL GEOPHYSICAL YEAR The International Geophysical Year (IGY) served magnificently as a vehicle for changing the Antarctic situation. The genesis of the IGY took place at a dinner party in the home of James Van Allen in Bethesda, Maryland, in the summer of 1950. This event has taken on legendary status and serves a range of purposes from a nearly mystical birth for the IGY to the reaffirming of the authority of science in modern life. At some level it may be viewed as a cabal led by Van Allen, British physicist Sydney Chapman, and American science entrepreneur Lloyd V. Berkner to ‘hoodwink’ the nations of the world into pursuing an aggressive scientific program that ensured funding and status for activities never dreamt of before. At another, it may be interpreted as cagey politicians manipulating the scientific community to provide the IGY as a stalking horse for the resolution of a thorny geopolitical problem. Indeed, it is both of these.10 Pressed by Berkner, the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) agreed in 1952 to pursue a comprehensive series of global geophysical activities to span the period July 1957–December 1958.11 The IGY was timed to coincide with the high point of the eleven-­year cycle of sunspot activity. It eventually involved sixty-­seven nations

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 218

21/12/2016 10:11

Establishing open rights  219 ­ ndertaking research in eleven major scientific areas: Earth sciences, aurora and airglow, u cosmic rays, geomagnetism, gravity, ionospheric physics, precision mapping, meteorology, oceanography, seismology, and solar activity. More than 4,000 research stations participated in the cooperative endeavor. While efforts were concentrated in the Polar Regions, terrestrial stations elsewhere also yielded valuable scientific data. In the process scientists defined the mid-­ocean ridges (developing the theories of plate tectonics and the nature of the Earth’s crust that have defined modern geology), discovered the Van Allen radiation belts using data from the Explorer 1 and Explorer 3 satellites, charted ocean depths and ocean currents, and measured a range of terrestrial phenomena from the magnetic field to upper atmospheric winds.12 In the run-­up to the beginning of the IGY, Berkner described the excitement it offered in the pursuit of science: ‘Tired of war and dissension, men of all nations have turned to “Mother Earth” for common efforts on which all find it easy to agree.’13 Two overwhelmingly significant events occurred as a result of the IGY. The first was the development of a means for multiple nations to engage in scientific activities on a continent where no state exercised uncontested control. The establishment of this peaceful, collaborative occupation of Antarctica is a subject of great significance.14 The second major event to emerge from IGY was the space age, begun on 4 October 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, following it almost a month later with Sputnik 2. The United States followed soon thereafter with Explorer 1, on 31 January 1958.15 Historian Walter A. McDougall lays out well the IGY origins of the space age, but condemns those origins as ‘the institutionalization of technological change for state purposes, that is, the state-­funded and managed R&D explosion of our time’.16 In this view, science found itself in the service of the state for ends far removed from the apolitical ideal of many scientists.

THE IGY SATELLITE PROPOSAL US President Dwight D. Eisenhower was also not unreceptive to increases in funding for space activities purely to further scientific understanding. The President’s approval of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) satellite effort is instructive on this score. As early as 1950, a small group of scientists in the United States began discussing among themselves the possibility of using Earth-­circling satellites to obtain scientific information about the planet. In 1952, urged on by these same American scientists, the ICSU proposed that the IGY study extra-­terrestrial relations during a period of maximum solar activity.17 In October 1954, at the behest of essentially this same group of US scientists, the ICSU challenged nations to use their missiles being developed for war to launch scientific satellites to support the IGY research program. In July 1955, largely the same enclave of American scientists convinced Eisenhower that the United States should respond to the ICSU call for participation in the IGY by launching a scientific satellite.18 Although he approved the IGY satellite, Eisenhower was cost-­conscious about it, especially as it seemed to grow in cost and complexity with every review. He repeatedly wondered about its voracious appetite for public funds, especially since the development of the Vanguard rocket (which would place the IGY satellite into orbit) supposedly took a back seat to national security space activities, most notably the crash program to develop ballistic

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 219

21/12/2016 10:11

220  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica ­ issiles. From its initial cost estimates of less than $25 million, Vanguard had mushm roomed to a cost of $67.9 million by August 1956 and to $110 million by the summer of 1957.19 While concerned about this growth, Eisenhower did not want to cancel the program, although his secretary of the treasury recommended as much, because of its use as a tool in foreign policy. Instead, the President forcefully reminded his top advisers that the costly instrumentation that scientists were now calling for ‘had not been ­envisaged’ and ‘stressed that the element of national prestige, so strongly emphasized in NSC 5520, depended on getting a satellite into its orbit, and not on the instrumentation of the scientific satellite’.20 The budgetary growth of the Vanguard program, transforming it from the simple task of putting any type of satellite into orbit into a project to launch a satellite with ‘considerable instrumentation’, reminded Eisenhower of the worst type of technological inflation, as every scientist seemed to want to hang another piece of equipment on the vehicle.21

ESTABLISHMENT OF THE OPEN SKIES DOCTRINE The American effort to launch an IGY satellite failed to beat the Soviet Union’s related efforts. With the launch of Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957, the Soviets helped to establish the overwhelmingly critical principle of free overflight in space, to traverse space over a foreign nation for any non-­lethal purpose free from the fear of attack. This made possible orbiting reconnaissance satellites operated by both Cold War rivals, which served more than virtually any other technology as a stabilizing influence in the Cold War. The ability to obtain timely, accurate information about what rivals were doing helped to minimize the risk that national leaders on both sides would make decisions based on faulty intelligence. President Lyndon B. Johnson did not overestimate the importance of spaceflight technology in 1967 when he said that the United States probably spent between $35 and $40 billion on it, but ‘If nothing else had come of it except the knowledge we’ve gained from space photography, it would be worth 10 times what the whole program has cost.’22 ‘Freedom of space’ was an extremely significant issue for those concerned with orbiting satellites, because the imposition of territorial prerogatives outside the atmosphere could legally restrict any nation from orbiting satellites without the permission of nations that might be overflown. Since the United States was in a position to capitalize on ‘freedom of space’ it favored an open position. Many other nations had little interest in establishing a free access policy that allowed the US to orbit reconnaissance satellites overhead. In a critical document, ‘Meeting the Threat of Surprise Attack’, issued on 14 February 1955, US defense officials raised the question of international law governing territorial waters and airspace, in which individual nations controlled those regions as if they were their own soil. That international custom allowed nations to board and confiscate vessels within territorial waters near their coastlines and to force down aircraft flying in their territorial airspace. This has resulted in shoot-­downs on occasion, as when the Soviet Union downed a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 in 1983. But in 1957 space as a territory had not yet been defined, and US leaders argued that it should be recognized as beyond the normal confines of territorial limits. An opposite position, however, argued for the extension of territorial limits into space above a nation into infinity.23 Eisenhower tried to obtain a ‘freedom of space’ decision on 21 July 1955, when he

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 220

21/12/2016 10:11

Establishing open rights  221 proposed it at a US/USSR summit in Geneva, Switzerland. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev rejected the proposal, however, saying that it was an obvious American attempt to ‘accumulate target information’. Eisenhower later admitted, ‘We knew the Soviets wouldn’t accept it, but we took a look and thought it was a good move.’24 The Americans thereafter worked quietly to establish the precedent. When Sputnik overflew the United States and other nations of the world, four days later, on 8 October 1957, Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles told the president: ‘the Russians have . . . done us a good turn, unintentionally, in establishing the concept of freedom of international space.’ Eisenhower immediately grasped this as a means of pressing ahead with the launching of a reconnaissance satellite. The precedent held for later satellites, and by the end of 1958 the tenuous principle of ‘freedom of space’ had been established. By happenstance, the Russian space program had established the US-­backed precedent for free access.25 Throughout 1958 the Eisenhower administration affirmed the free-­access-­to-­space position already established by precedent and declared that space would not be used for warlike purposes. At the same time it asserted that reconnaissance satellites and other military support activities that could be aided by satellites, such as communications and weather forecasting, were peaceful activities, since they assisted in strategic deterrence and therefore averted war. This was a critical policy decision, as it provided for open use of space and fashioned a virtual ‘inspection system’ to forewarn of surprise attack through the use of reconnaissance satellites. Some have speculated that Eisenhower might actually have held back the US effort to launch an orbital satellite to allow the Soviets to do so first, thereby establishing the all-­ important principle of free overflight of space. After all, had the US launched before the Soviet Union, Khrushchev might have protested that it was as a violation of his nation’s airspace. This could have thrown the ‘freedom of space’ concept into years of intense and confrontational international negotiation. While this is a fascinating possibility, there is no evidence to believe that the Eisenhower administration actually conspired to lose the race to launch the first satellite. In reacting to Sputnik, Eisenhower achieved the right of overflight because of the Soviet launch. But this was serendipity, a single happy consequence of what was otherwise a set of poor decisions. At the same time, Eisenhower was pressed by a set of political exigencies, a critical mass of interests, and a key cadre of scientific and technical officials within the federal government and their supporters in universities, corporations, and think tanks to create a powerful, large, and costly federal agency to carry out space exploration.26

THE ANTARCTIC EXPERIENCE In many respects, the history of cooperation and collaboration in Antarctic science mirrors the larger story of how the various global powers have interacted since the conclusion of World War II. If one were to characterize it accurately throughout the last ­fifty-­plus years, the undeniable conclusion is that all parties (particularly the two Cold War superpowers) have enjoyed an uneasy relationship in which they have recognized that they were better off cooperating rather than competing and in which they constantly jockeyed, even while cooperating, for a superior position vis-­à-­vis the other nations in

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 221

21/12/2016 10:11

222  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica partnership. Certainly, that has been the case among senior officials of the United States; many over the years have viewed the nation’s effort in Antarctica fundamentally as a program aimed, at least in part, at attaining the United States’ foreign policy objectives. If securing those objectives required cooperative relations in Antarctica, such was most assuredly acceptable and supportable as a national objective. After the IGY, representatives of a number of states met in Washington, DC, to negotiate what became the Antarctic Treaty, intended to ‘internationalize’ Antarctica as a ‘continent dedicated to peace and science’.27 Article IV of the Antarctic Treaty suspended (or ‘froze’ to use the official pun of the conference) all sovereignty claims to the continent for its duration, bringing to an end a phase of serious geopolitical disputes over the continent. To many people at the time it appeared as if the idealism of science had triumphed over politics. This achievement was all the more remarkable for bringing the two superpowers together at the height of the Cold War. Many observers have followed this idealistic interpretation of the connection between the IGY and the Antarctic Treaty, and the southern continent tends to be held up as an all too rare example of scientific cooperation fostering political harmony.28 As early as the debate on the ratification of the Treaty, US polar scientist and explorer Laurence McKinley Gould testified with a level of hyperbole unusual even for the Senate that the Treaty was ‘a document unique in history that may take its place alongside the Magna Carta and other great symbols of man’s quest for enlightenment and order’.29 An overstatement, to be sure, but this type of exaggeration has remained a staple of the Treaty’s advocates ever since. For example, as stated in a 2009 assessment, the Antarctic Treaty was responsible for three key positive developments over a fifty-­year period: It has preserved 10% of the Earth for peaceful purposes It has created the world’s first nuclear-­free zone It has instituted an unprecedented international scientific collaboration

This statement went on to celebrate the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) as a singularly positive development and the model for all future collaborative endeavors. ‘It has done these things in the face of significant political and economic challenges over the decades’, observers stated. ‘Not only must these achievements be recognised, celebrated and publicised, but they must also offer guidance to lawyers, diplomats, scientists and lobbyists in pursuing similar goals elsewhere in the world.’30 Of course, the IGY did play an important role in the resolution of the Antarctic sovereignty dispute, but not in quite the idealistic way that the traditional narrative has ­suggested.31 As late as June 1954, the US National Security Council proposed a territorial solution for Antarctica that would affirm control of the continent ‘by the United States and friendly powers and exclude our most probable enemies’.32 The actual science of the IGY, and the improved understanding of the Antarctic environment that it facilitated, played an important role in the partial resolution of the question of sovereignty. As officials in the treaty nations, especially in Great Britain and the United States, learned more about the reality that Antarctica contained little or nothing of immediate economic value, they came to favor a limited internationalization of the continent. Historian John Krige has explained how international collaboration through science has taken place in a variety of settings where very little is at stake. He has astutely

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 222

21/12/2016 10:11

Establishing open rights  223 c­ommented that ‘collaboration has worked most smoothly when the science or technology concerned is not of direct strategic (used here to mean commercial or military) importance. As soon as a government feels that its national interests are directly involved in a field of R&D, it would prefer to “go it alone”.’ He also noted that the success of cooperative projects may take as their central characteristic that they have ‘no practical application in at least the short to medium term’.33 I would add that the sole exception to this perspective might be when nations decide that for prestige or diplomatic purposes it is imperative to cooperate; the International Space Station of the last part of the twentieth century is a prime example.34 The results of the IGY convinced US officials that internationalization would be the best course for Antarctic politics. US officials wanted to prevent the Cold War from spreading to this southern continent, ideally by excluding the Soviet Union from the region. They feared, with some justification, that a sovereignty dispute might be exploited by the Communist Bloc as a demonstration of divisions within the Western Alliance. When it became increasingly clear that Antarctica contained little in the short-­to-­medium term that could justify a formal US claim to any part of the continent, the central US policy objective became to defuse political tensions. Just like their British counterparts, US officials were unwilling to give up for good their ‘historic rights’ in Antarctica, and, as a consequence, they did not want any sort of genuine internationalization, such as that which might have happened had the Antarctic question been handed over to the United Nations. Having decided that some form of limited internationalization would be the best option for their interests in Antarctica, officials in Great Britain and the United States set out to make this happen. The rhetoric of scientific internationalism would be one of the principal tools for achieving their political goals. Science in general, and the goodwill generated by the IGY in particular, offered a nonthreatening way to bring territorial rivals together to discuss political questions. A series of secret meetings set in motion the process that would lead to the signature of the Antarctic Treaty of 1959. Initially the four countries – the United States, Great Britain, Australia and Chile – disagreed on the question of Soviet involvement. US officials, perhaps somewhat naively, believed that they could create a treaty regime for Antarctica that would exclude the Soviet Union. British officials – who were especially keen on resolving the dispute – argued, more realistically, that the communist superpower would have to be included for any internationalization of Antarctica to work. After some discussion, the British position prevailed.35 Without question, advocates of an Antarctic Treaty exploited the ‘goodwill’ generated by the IGY. Argentina, Chile, and other claimants found themselves swept along, somewhat reluctantly, by the process of internationalization. As Paul Arthur Berkman has commented Building on the momentum of scientific cooperation during the IGY, in May 1958, President Eisenhower invited the Soviet Union and the other ten nations involved with Antarctic research (the seven claimants, plus Belgium, Japan, and South Africa) to seek an effective means of ensuring that the ‘vast uninhabited wastes of Antarctic shall be used only for peaceful purposes’.

Over the next eighteen months, sixty secret meetings were convened in the United States, culminating in the Conference on Antarctica between 15 October and 1 December 1959, when the Antarctic Treaty was signed.36 The end result was generally favorable to all

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 223

21/12/2016 10:11

224  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica participating countries, as they found themselves members of the ATS’s ‘exclusive club’, which continues to govern the continent to this day. The traditional narrative of the internationalization of Antarctica suggests that the IGY functioned as a deus ex machina coming out of nowhere to resolve the continent’s vexing political problems through a wave of scientific idealism. In this interpretation, the cooperation and goodwill generated by the IGY acted as a force ‘above politics’, with the ability to overcome the petty squabbling that plagued the question of Antarctic sovereignty. IGY science fundamentally changed perceptions of the Antarctic environment and, at least in the short term, dispelled the myth that Antarctica could possess invaluable minerals. This reassessment of the economic worth of Antarctica changed political attitudes toward the continent, and both Britain and the United States became amenable to a limited internationalization of the continent. Having decided that they wanted internationalization, Britain and the United States then exploited scientific goodwill as a means to bring this about.37 In many ways the United States got exactly what it wanted from the Antarctic Treaty of 1959: limited internationalism that defused political tensions, while claims (for the British) and the reservation of the right to make claims (for the United States) remained in a state of suspended animation, to be brought out again if ever the occasion should demand. The Argentineans and Chileans viewed the Antarctic environment differently, seeing it as an ‘integral part’ of their national territories. They opposed any form of internationalization and only participated in the Antarctic Treaty negotiations when they realized that the weight of international opinion was against them. Nevertheless, despite this reluctance, their participation helped to give credibility to the solution of limited internationalization. Science also offered the Antarctic Treaty signatories a useful tool for excluding unwanted countries from their new political club.38 Far from being a simple story of (good) science trumping (bad) politics, the history of the connection between the IGY and the Antarctic Treaty involved the political exploitation of scientific goodwill to achieve geopolitical objectives. Rather than bringing imperial interests in Antarctica to an end, as the traditional interpretation would suggest, the Antarctic Treaty reformulated and retained these interests. This observation opens Antarctica to study from a postcolonial framework. Postcolonial scholarship seeks to highlight and challenge continued imperial practices of exclusion and unequal power relationships after the ‘decolonization’ of most of the colonized world in the mid-­twentieth century. According to Collis and Stevens, ‘The period 1954–64 in Antarctica shows the transformation of traditional colonialism into particularly modern forms.’ They noted that while the justification for American efforts in Antarctica rested on science, those scientific activities held profound geopolitical consequences. Despite the numerous achievements of the ATS in protecting the environment and maintaining peace, it remains firmly rooted in the power structures of Western imperialism and the Cold War. The Antarctic Treaty itself is a distinctly postcolonial treaty, because the retention of imperial influence is written into its text.39 In addition to having an intrinsic value of its own – especially at a time of growing awareness of the centrality of the southern continent to the global environmental system – science has also done much to ensure peaceful coexistence between nations in Antarctica. Scientific cooperation laid the basis for half a century of collaborative activities in a region that was becoming increasingly contentious in the 1940s and 1950s. As a conse-

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 224

21/12/2016 10:11

Establishing open rights  225 quence of its success, scientific activity plays an important role in legitimizing the ATS, in both its positive and negative dimensions. Since its ratification in 1961, the United States has periodically reaffirmed the principles of the Antarctic Treaty. For example, in October 1970, President Richard Nixon stated US policy for Antarctica as encompassing the following: To maintain the Antarctic Treaty and ensure that this continent will continue to be used only for peaceful purposes and shall not become an area or object of international discord. To foster cooperative scientific research for the solution of worldwide and regional problems, including environmental monitoring and prediction and assessment of resources. To protect the Antarctic environment and develop appropriate measures to ensure the equitable and wise use of living and non-­living resources.

The president added that ‘Science has provided a successful basis for international accord, and the Antarctic is the only continent where science serves as the principal expression of national policy and interest.’ He supported the continuation of its primacy on the continent. At the same time, thereafter, as stated periodically in national security documents, the US intended ‘maintaining an active and influential United States presence in the Antarctic’ that is ‘responsive to United States scientific, economic, and political objectives’.40

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE OUTER SPACE TREATY While Dwight D. Eisenhower deserves credit for the establishment of ‘open skies’ and overflight as a principle in space, as well as his role in pressing scientific internationalism as the raison d’être of activities in Antarctica, successors of another political party put their own cast on this structure in 1967 with the ‘Treaty on the Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and other Celestial Bodies’. Its first principle enshrined ‘freedom of space’. The analogy with the Antarctic Treaty is clear, and both treaties indeed share some common roots, in addition to each proving ‘fit for purpose’ for decades after their initial signature. Despite some relatively modest alterations over time, the Outer Space Treaty has provided a remarkably consistent policy for the United States during the first fifty years of the space age. Six basic principles enunciated in various policy documents, including this treaty, have been deployed by the United States. First, the United States and the Soviet Union established in the 1950s and have maintained to the present ‘freedom of space’, ensuring free access to space and the unimpeded passage through space of all satellites and other vehicles regardless of national origin and for whatever purposes intended. Any interference with operational space systems became an infringement of sovereignty and could be construed as an act of war. Second, the parties agreed not to press claims of sovereignty over any part of space or its bodies. Third, the right to defend against attack was preserved and would be considered self-­defense just as on the Earth. Fourth, this policy regime explicitly recognized all the various nations’ civil, military, and intelligence programs as legitimate. Fifth, ownership of space assets rested with the original entity placing them in space, and laws of salvage similar to that of the sea were extended to

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 225

21/12/2016 10:11

226  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica space. Finally, all parties agreed that no weapons of mass destruction were to be placed in space, especially ensconcing this decision in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.41 In truth several international organizations have also been involved in the governance of space activities. The United Nations General Assembly established a Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in 1959 to discuss scientific, technical, and legal issues related to international space activities; sixty-­one states are members of the Committee at the time of writing. This Committee has provided the forum for the development of five treaties and a number of declarations of principles related to space activities. The most important of these is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which set forth the general legal principles governing space activities. Other parts of the United Nations system, most notably the International Telecommunications Union, which has long been engaged in space-­related activities, responsible as it is for the allocation of radio frequencies and orbital locations for satellite services. Effectively, this represented an Outer Space Treaty Regime comparable to the ATS.42 These treaties were developed at a time when the Cold War reigned supreme in geopolitics and rival governments were the dominant actors in space, before commercial space activities had much of a place in space operations. While the Outer Space Treaty Regime demands that space be used for ‘peaceful ­purposes’, it did not preclude ‘defense and intelligence-­related activities in pursuit of national security and other goals’.43 Like the ATS, it emerged from the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union in the mid-­1960s. Its political genesis may be seen in documents from the Lyndon B. Johnson White House in December 1966 about the proposed space treaty and other initiatives to lessen Cold War rivalries: Moving toward a more cooperative relation with the USSR in this field will reinforce our over-­all policy toward the Soviets. More importantly: It will save money, which can go to (i) foreign aid, (ii) domestic purposes – thus mitigating the political strain of the war in Vietnam.

The analysis went on to state that ‘While largely atmospheric in their effects, the UN “no bombs in orbit” resolution and the proposed celestial bodies/outer space treaty are pointed in this direction [of creating a legal regime for governing space]. We need to seek our potential problem areas and develop practical ways of resolving them.’44 While the Antarctic Treaty served as a framework for this Outer Space Treaty, there was a fundamental difference – namely that only the USA and the USSR had any experience whatsoever in space. According to congressional hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations in 1967, the Outer Space Treaty was first pursued as a means of ensuring that outer space would be explored and developed exclusively under peaceful conditions under an international framework, as in the case with the Antarctic Treaty. Accordingly, the centerpiece of the space treaty, negotiated through the United Nations, centered on concerns over military expansion and national security, coupled with a desire to ensure the sanctity of ‘freedom of international space’. Scientific activities in space also served as peacekeeping surrogates and cooperative ventures that ensured internationalization and defused political tensions – that the political exploitation of scientific goodwill facilitated essentially political objectives. For both treaties science legitimized international control by creating mechanisms for management and goals for continued rational use that have continued to this day.45 The seventeen Articles of the Outer Space Treaty have considerable overlap and

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 226

21/12/2016 10:11

Establishing open rights  227 s­imilarity with the fourteen Articles of the original Antarctic Treaty. Both stipulate exclusively peaceful uses and strict limitations on military activities and the use of nuclear weapons and materials. Both also prohibit governments from extending national sovereignty or making new resource claims. Both treaties include stipulations allowing use for scientific research, allowing the use of military personnel and/or equipment for scientific research, but contain strict verbiage against military fortifications, maneuvers, and weapons testing. The Outer Space Treaty allows for all countries, irrespective of economic means, to take advantage of the scientific development of space, whereas Article III of the Antarctic Treaty encourages specialized agencies of the United Nations and other international organizations having a scientific or technical interest in Antarctica.46 Notable differences had to do with the nature of space exploration and the rescue of astronauts and cosmonauts, with agreement that all signatories would provide assistance in the event of accidents or emergencies. For example, invoking the Outer Space Treaty as the rationale during the Apollo 13 crisis in 1970, the Soviet Union famously offered assistance to the United States to rescue the astronauts either in space or at sea. The United States just as famously declined this assistance, believing it motivated just as much by Soviet desire to inspect American technology as to assist in the rescue. There were numerous differences between the priorities of the US and the USSR when negotiating the Outer Space Treaty. Perhaps the most difficult was the effort of the Soviets to ban all private enterprise in space: ‘All activities of any kind pertaining to the exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out solely by States.’ Unsure of the objective by the Soviets in making this proposal – was it just a negotiating tactic or ‘an attempt to extend Communist principles to outer space’? – the US proposed a compromise stating ‘that States bear international responsibility for national activities in space, whether carried on by government authority or by other entities’.47 Accordingly, the Outer Space Treaty System may be considered permissive in handling most commercial activities in space, containing principles useful to economic development. In regard to space resource utilization, private appropriation of extracted resources is even permissible under the terms of the Outer Space Treaty.48 In such cases as this, the use of vague language ensured that the Treaty could be adopted, but also that it would require later refinement. At the United States Senate ratification hearings for the Treaty Arthur Goldberg, who led the US negotiating team, admitted this. When asked about Article I of the Treaty he told the Senators, ‘the article was a “broad general declaration of purposes” that would have no specific impact until its intent was detailed in subsequent, detailed agreements.’49 The value of vagueness has served diplomats well for centuries; international agreements and treaties that are too specific sometimes require nations to take actions that are less than wise. Examples abound, but the set of interlocking defense agreements between European nations in the summer of 1914 led to a very ill-­considered decision in favor of war that every nation came to regret quickly once World War I entered its trench warfare stage.50 These issues had to be made more specific over time as additional treaties, regulations, and international ­agreements were struck.51

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 227

21/12/2016 10:11

228  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

CONCLUSION – THE ANTARCTIC AND OUTER SPACE TREATIES AFTER THE COLD WAR The two separate treaty regimes, for Antarctica and outer space, worked relatively well in  the context of the Cold War environment between World War II and about 1990. At about the same time the rise of modern environmental concerns and the pressure from extractive companies in Antarctica shifted concerns there as well. Pressures on the ATS also resulted from nations such as Malaysia contesting what it viewed as an unfair arrangement dating back to the 1980s, as well as disagreements over the Madrid Protocol in the latter 1980s and proposals for Antarctic mining. Nevertheless, the common element in both treaties today is that they have proven flexible enough to cope with various challenges, despite those challenges being different in nature. The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, however, changed the geopolitical dynamics and brought changes in the manner in which the nations of the world have dealt with both Antarctica and outer space. Both treaty regimes have clear statements about prohibitions, guidelines, and objectives that have served well for many years. Overall the evolution of policies and law governing these regions has reflected the influence of the science community on the political leadership in concert with geopolitical motivations, replacing what U.M. Bohlmann called ‘the early hard power arguments to the quest for scientific knowledge perceived as a cultural imperative’.52 In the last twenty years a series of new pressures has arisen. At a fundamental level the IGY, the problem of Antarctica, ‘freedom of space’, and Sputnik were interrelated and handled in an essentially similar manner. All actions thus far have largely been predicated on the belief that nothing of intrinsic value is present either in Antarctica or in space. Both major legal structures – the ‘freedom of space’ doctrine ensconced in the Outer Space Treaty and the Antarctic Treaty – are fragile instruments at present and under assault from several quarters, especially military and economic interests. In both cases, a question: what would happen should something of worth be found in Antarctica or in space? Accordingly, while the communities overseeing these regions continue to protect and sustain science exploration and discovery through existing treaties and policies, it is obvious that in the future efforts to allow appropriate technological development and expansion of human activities must take place. In both cases future activities will require considerable work to ensure success in the future.

NOTES   1. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the conference, ‘Exploring Ice and Snow in the Cold War,’ Deutsches Museum, Munich, Germany, 27–29 January 2011. It is much revised from that first presentation.   2. We have discussed this development in Launius, Fleming and DeVorkin 2010.   3. Hall 1993, 5–6 and 19–24; Hall 1995, 213–29.   4. Peterson 1988; Myhre 1986; Burton 1979; Berkman 2009a.   5. Dembling and Arons 1967; Joyner 1986.   6. The idealistic position is maintained in Lewis 1965. A more realpolitik position is offered in Berkman 2002.   7. General histories of Antarctica are not numerous, and none are authoritative. The only work of substance is Martin 1996.   8. Dodds 2002.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 228

21/12/2016 10:11

Establishing open rights  229   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Belanger 2010, 266. Good 2010. On ICSU, see Ernster 1991. Green and Lomask 1971, 1–24; Korsmo 2007; Bulkeley 1991, 89–103; Needell 2000, 297–323. Berkner 1954, 575. Spiller 2004; Summerhayes 2008; Dean, Naylor, Turchetti, and Siegert 2008. Solid overviews of the history of space exploration include Burrows 1998 and Launius 1998. McDougall 1997, 5–7. This group included Lloyd Berkner, Joseph Kaplan, Fred Singer, James Van Allen, and Homer Newell. The fingerprints of these core leaders are all over every decision relative to the IGY satellite program and the US decision by Eisenhower to sponsor a satellite. See the discussion of this effort in Green and Lomask 1971, 6–39; Bulkeley 1991, 89–122; Hall 1964, 102–8. National Security Council, NSC 5520 Draft Statement of Policy on US Scientific Satellite Program, 20 May 1955; United States National Committee for the International Geophysical Year 1957–1958, Minutes of the First Meeting, Technical Panel on Earth Satellite Program, 20 October 1955, both in NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA History Office, Washington, DC; Don Irwin to Mr Rockefeller and General Parker, Pentagon Briefing on Earth Satellite Program, 12 October 1955; Richard Hirsch to Elmer B. Staats, Pentagon Meeting on Earth Satellite Program, 13 October 1955, all in box 11, OCB 000.9 (National and Physical Sciences), White House Office of Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC, OCB Central Files, Eisenhower Library. Percival Brundage to Eisenhower, United States Scientific Satellite Program, 8 October 1957, box 744, Outer Space Box, Earth-­Circling Satellite Folder, Official File, WHCF, Eisenhower Library. Memorandum of Discussion at the 283rd Meeting of the National Security Council, Washington, 3 May 1956, 11: 734–42; Memorandum of Discussion at the 322nd Meeting of the NSC, 10 May 1957, 11: 749, both in Glennon 1988. Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1958), 719. The NRO at the Crossroads: Report of the National Commission for the Review of the National Reconnaissance Office (Washington, DC: National Reconnaissance Office, 1 November 2000), Appendix E, p. 120. The Report to the President by the Technological Capabilities Panel of the Science Advisory Committee, Vol. II, Meeting the Threat of Surprise Attack (Washington, DC, 14 February 1955), p. 151. This declassified Top Secret report can be found in the records of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration for 1952–61 in the Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Policy Papers, Box 16, Folder NSC 5522, Technological Capabilities Panel, Eisenhower Presidential Library. Jones 2009, 80. National Security Council, Discussion at the 339th Meeting of the National Security Council, 10 October 1957, 11 October 1957, NSC Series, Box 9, Eisenhower Papers, 1953–1961 (Ann Whitman File), Eisenhower Library. See Mieczkowski 2013, 78–9. See Lewis 1965; Roberts, van der Watt, and Howkins 2016. Elzinga 1993; Elzinga and Bohlin 1993; Belanger 2010. Quoted in Berkman 2009b, 412–13. The Antarctic Treaty: 50 More Years of Preserving Peace? Cumberland Lodge, Windsor, UK, 10–12 June 2009. Spiller 2004. Quoted in Berkman 2009b, 412. Krige 1997, 4. A superb example of this is the effort beginning in 1997 to shift American launch operations to the private sector by contracting out the majority of activities at Kennedy Space Center to the USA Corporation. Vicuña 1986. Berkman 2009a, 412. Bulkeley 2010. Berkman 2010. Collis and Stevens 2004, 95. National Security Decision Memoranda 71 (1970) and 318 (1976); Presidential Decision Directive NSC-­ 26, US Policy in the Arctic and Antarctic Regions, 1994. This represents a slightly different set of principles from those offered in Hall and Butterworth 2006, 20. United Nations Treaties and Principles on Outer Space (Vienna, Austria: United Nations, 1999). Presidential Decision Directive/National Space Policy-­8 (PDD/NSTC-­8; 19 September 1996), Introduction, Sect. (3).

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 229

21/12/2016 10:11

230  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica 44. Henry Owen to Walt W. Rostow, 9 December 1966, with atch, US State Department, Space Goals After the Lunar Landing, October 1966, LBJ Library, Austin, TX. 45. Race, M.S. Policies for Scientific Exploration and Environmental Protection: Comparison of the Antarctic and Outer Space Treaties, presentation at Antarctic Treaty Summit, Washington DC, 30 November 2009. 46. United States Congress, Treaty on Outer Space: Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966). 47. US Delegation Position Paper, Negotiations with the Soviets on the Legal Problems of Outer Space, 24 September 1963, LBJ Library. 48. White, W.N. 2003. Interpreting Article II of the Outer Space Treaty, paper presented at the 54th International Astronautical Congress, International Astronautical Federation, Bremen, Germany. 49. New York Times 1967, 20. 50. See Hamilton and Herwig 2003, 1–45. 51. Baca 1993, 1041; 1065–9; Wasser 1998, 56. 52. Bohlmann 2009, 193.

REFERENCES Baca, K.A. 1993. Property Rights in Outer Space. Journal of Air Law and Commerce 58: 1041–85. Belanger, D.O. 2010. The International Geophysical Year in Antarctica: A Triumph of ‘Apolitical’ Science, Politics, and Peace. Pages 265–78 in Launius, Fleming, and DeVorkin (eds), Globalizing Polar Science: Reconsidering the International Polar and Geophysical Years. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Berkman, P.A. 2002. Science into Policy: Global Lessons from Antarctica. San Diego, California: Academic Press. Berkman, P.A. 2009a. Common Interests in the International Space of Antarctica, available online at Antarctic Treaty Summit 2009, www.atsummit50.aq/media/journal-­6.pdf, accessed 21 January 2011. Berkman, P.A. 2009b. International Spaces Promote Peace. Nature 462: 412–13. Berkman P.A. 2010. Common Interests in the International Space of Antarctica. Polar Record 46(1): 7–9. Berkner, L.V. 1954. International Scientific Action: The International Geophysical Year 1957–58. Science 119: 569–75. Bohlmann, U.M. 2009. The Need of a Legal Framework for Space Exploration. Pages 182–95 in Codignola-­Bo, L., Schrogl, K.U., Lukaszczyk, A. and Peter, N. (eds), Humans in Outer Space-­Interdisciplinary Odysseys. New York: SpringerWien. Bulkeley, R. 1991. The Sputniks Crisis and Early United States Space Policy: A Critique of the Historiography of Space. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bulkeley, R. 2010. The Political Origins of the Antarctic Treaty. Polar Record 46(1): 9–11. Burrows, W.E. 1998. This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age. New York: Random House. Burton, S.J. 1979. New Stresses on the Antarctic Treaty: Toward International Legal Institutions Governing Antarctic Resources. Virginia Law Review 65(April): 421–512. Collis C. and Stevens, Q. 2004. Modern Colonialism in Antarctica: The Coldest Battle of the Cold War. Pages 72–95 in Lehman G. and Nichols, D. (eds), Proceedings 7th Australasian Urban History/Planning History Conference. Geelong, Australia: Deakin University Press. Dean, K., Naylor, S., Turchetti, S. and Siegert, M. 2008. Data in Antarctic Science and Politics. Social Studies of Science 38(4): 571–604. Dembling, P.G. and Arons, D.M. 1967. The Evolution of the Outer Space Treaty. Journal of Air Law and Commerce 33: 419–56. Dodds, K. 2002. Pink Ice: Britain and the South Atlantic Empire. New York: I.B. Tauris. Elzinga, A. 1993. Antarctica: The Construction of a Continent by and for Science. Pages 73–106 in Crawford, E.T., Shinn, T. and Sörlin, S. (eds), Denationalizing Science: The Contexts of International Scientific Practice. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Elzinga, A. and Bohlin, I. 1993. The Politics of Science in Polar Regions. Pages 7–27 in Elzinga, A. (ed.), Changing Trends in Antarctic Research. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Ernster, L. 1991. ICSU: The First Sixty Years. Science International special issue: 1–69. Glennon, J.P. (ed.) 1988. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957. Washington DC: Government Printing Office. Good, G.A. 2010. Sydney Chapman: Dynamo Behind the International Geophysical Year. Pages 177–203 in Launius, R.D., Fleming, J.R. and DeVorkin, D.H. (eds), Globalizing Polar Science: Reconsidering the International Polar and Geophysical Years. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Green, C.M. and Lomask, M. 1971. Vanguard: A History. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 230

21/12/2016 10:11

Establishing open rights  231 Hall, R.C. 1964. Origins and Early Development of the Vanguard and Explorer Satellite Programs. Airpower Historian 9(October): 101–12. Hall, R.C. 1993. The Origins of US Space Policy: Eisenhower, Open Skies, and Freedom of Space. Colloquy December: 5–24. Hall, R.C. 1995. Origins of US Space Policy: Eisenhower, Open Skies, and Freedom of Space. In Logsdon, J.M. (ed.), Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the US Civil Space Program, Volume I, Organizing for Exploration. Washington, DC: NASA Special Publication 4407. Hall, R.C. and Butterworth, R. 2006. Military Space and National Policy: Record and Interpretation. Washington, DC: George C. Marshall Institute. Hamilton, R.F. and Herwig, H.H. (eds) 2003. The Origins of World War I. New York: Cambridge University Press. Jones, H. 2009. Crucible of Power: A History of American Foreign Relations from 1945. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Joyner, C.C. 1986. Legal Implications of the Concept of the Common Heritage of Mankind. The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 35(January): 190–99. Korsmo, F.L. 2007. The Genesis of the International Geophysical Year. Physics Today June: 38–43. Krige, J. 1997. The Politics of European Collaboration in Space. Space Times: Magazine of the American Astronautical Society 36(September–October): 4–9. Launius, R.D. 1998. Frontiers of Space Exploration. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1998. Launius, R.D, Fleming, J.R. and DeVorkin, D.H. (eds) 2010. Globalizing Polar Science: Reconsidering the International Polar and Geophysical Years. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lewis, R.S. 1965. A Continent for Science: The Antarctic Adventure. New York: Viking Press. Martin, S. 1996. A History of Antarctica. Sydney, Australia: State Library of New South Wales Press. McDougall, W.A. 1997. The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. New York: Basic Books, 1985; reprint Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mieczkowski, Y. 2013. Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World Prestige. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Myhre, J.D. 1986. The Antarctic Treaty System: Politics, Law, and Diplomacy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Needell, A.A. 2000. Science, Cold War, and the American State: Lloyd V. Berkner and the Balance of Professional Ideals. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. New York Times. 1967. Space Treaty Called ‘Fuzzy’ at Senate Hearings: Rusk and Goldberg Dispute Unexpected Objections by Gore and Fulbright. 8 March: 20. Peterson, M.J. 1988. Managing the Frozen South: The Creation and Evolution of the Antarctic Treaty System. Berkeley: University of California Press. Roberts, P., van der Watt, L.-­M. and Howkins, A. 2016. Antarctica and the Humanities. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Spiller, J.L. 2004. Re-­imagining United States Antarctic Research. Public Understanding of Science 13: 31–53. Summerhayes, C. 2008. International Collaboration in Antarctica: The International Polar Years, the International Geophysical Year, and the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research. Polar Record 44: 321–34. Vicuña, F.O. 1986. Antarctic Conflict and International Cooperation. Pages 55–64 in Antarctic Treaty System: An Assessment, Proceedings of a Workshop Held at Beardmore South Field Camp, Antarctica, January 7–13, 1985. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Wasser, A. 1998. The Law That Could Make Privately Funded Space Settlement Profitable. Space Governance – The Journal of the United Societies in Space and the World Space Bar Association 5(1): 55–7.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 231

21/12/2016 10:11

15.  The originals: the role and influence of the original signatories to the Antarctic Treaty Marcus Haward

INTRODUCTION Twelve states (Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – USSR (now Russia), South Africa, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States of America (USA)) signed the Antarctic Treaty1 at the conclusion of the Antarctic Conference in Washington in December 1959. The original signatories have remained influential actors in the system, and proudly promote this status. These states became Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties (ATCPs) by virtue of their status as original signatories under Article IX.2 The other Consultative Parties – now numbering seventeen – have to accede to the treaty and then gain consultative party status by ‘conducting substantial research activity there, such as the establishment of a scientific station or the despatch of a scientific expedition’.3 This leaves questions moot over the meaning of ‘during such times’ and ‘substantial research activity’ in Article IX (2) and how acceding states assess the level of scientific work required of the original signatories. The original signatories have helped shape the development of what has become known as the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS). The majority of the original signatories have undertaken much of the ‘heavy lifting’ within the ATS,4 for example, the development of arrangements to address the protection of flora and fauna, the regulation of marine and mineral resources, environmental protection and the regulation of tourism. As a result the original signatory states have been active in developing administrative arrangements within the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings (ATCMs) and have had key roles in its Working Groups. Most significantly ‘the originals’ conduct a major proportion of the scientific effort and logistics on the continent.5

THE ORIGINS OF THE ORIGINALS’ INTERESTS The 1957–58 International Geophysical Year (IGY) involved joint scientific efforts by twelve states – Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the USSR, the United Kingdom and the USA. The IGY clearly shaped Antarctic science and facilitated collaborative approaches, two key elements later embodied in the 1959 Antarctic Treaty with broader geo-­political impact. The treaty was negotiated over eighteen months from June 1958 by the twelve states that had been involved in the IGY, following an initial invitation from the USA to meet in Washington DC. While the IGY brought the originals together, for many their interests in Antarctica emerged much earlier. The period from the Heroic Era (1890s – c.1922)6 through to the 232

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 232

21/12/2016 10:11

The originals  233 Second World War saw the beginnings of active interest in Antarctica from many of the originals. Voyages led by men from a number of countries in this period have provided important bases for ongoing Antarctic activity. Heroic Era expeditions provided the opportunity for territorial claims to be made. In many cases these expeditions involved some form of scientific research. The development of territorial claims led to what has been termed ‘the Antarctic Problem’7 – the emergence of overlapping claims on the Antarctic Peninsula – a problem that continued to develop in the period up to, through and beyond the Second World War. The claimant states were active in this conflict to reinforce their interests – see for example Operation Tabarin, conducted by the United Kingdom during the Second World War,8 which while ostensibly related to science and meteorology, aimed to reinforce the United Kingdom’s interests in the region against those of an increasingly assertive Argentina.

BOX 15.1  ANTARCTIC TERRITORIAL CLAIMS AND DATES OF CLAIM Falkland Islands Dependencies/British Antarctic Territory – 1908 Ross Dependency (New Zealand) – 1923 Adélie Land (France) – 1924 9 Peter I Island (Norway) – 1929 Australian Antarctic Territory – 1933 Queen Maud Land (Norway) – 1939 Chilean Antarctic Territory – 194010 Argentine Antarctica – 1946 11

The questions of territorial claims, sovereignty and national interests, were the critical elements of the Antarctic Problem in the 1940s. The British Imperial Conference of 1926 resolved that the entire Antarctic continent should become a possession of Britain and its dominions, New Zealand and Australia.12 Two major developments precipitated the Antarctic Problem: Chile’s claim to Antarctic territory in 1940 and Argentina’s claim to Antarctic territory in 1942 (more formally presented in 1946).13 Both claims overlapped the British claim. The United States’ interests in Antarctica date to exploration by Palmer in 1820 and Wilkes in 1840. Admiral Richard E. Byrd led three voyages to Antarctica from the late 1920s to 1940, and established the Little America station. Byrd urged the US government to claim what was known as the ‘unclaimed sector’ despite the ‘Hughes Doctrine’ of 1924 that ‘mere discovery is not sufficient grounds for territorial claims’.14 In the event the US government did not make a claim.15 Japan’s interests in Antarctica date to Nobu Shirase’s Japanese Antarctic Expedition of 1910–12 with the vessel Kainan Maru. An attempt to reach the South Pole saw a seven-­man party reached 80°05’S. During this expedition Shirase raised the Rising Sun flag and claimed the Yamamoto Snowfield.16 Japan’s activities in the IGY saw it invited to the Antarctic Conference, but its position on territorial sovereignty in Antarctica differed, and continues to differ markedly from the position advanced by claimant states because it was compelled to abandon past or future claims under the terms of the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951.17 South Africa’s first National Antarctic Expedition (SANAE) to Antarctica took place in 1959. During this

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 233

21/12/2016 10:11

234  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica first season the expedition members utilised an abandoned Norwegian station in Queen Maud Land while building the first SANAE station.18 The US was concerned over the future of Antarctica and entered into discussions with the UK in late 1947 and early 1948, proposing the establishment of a United Nations trusteeship. The UK opposed the idea of a UN trusteeship, as this would probably involve the Soviet Union, and instead proposed the establishment of an eight-­power condominium for Antarctica (in other words, the joint sovereignty of all seven claimants – plus the US). Of the other claimants Chile, Argentina and Australia were not interested in either proposal. Australia desired to solve the Antarctic Problem but was sceptical about internationalisation. Norway viewed the proposals as unnecessary, while France requested more information. Only New Zealand supported the internationalisation of Antarctica, although this position was not necessarily shared by all agencies of the New Zealand government. South Africa and Belgium expressed interest in participation in discussions on Antarctica.19 In 1949 the USSR indicated (and in 1950, formally announced) that any decision about Antarctica made without its participation would be illegitimate.20 The Soviet Union’s interests linked back to activities sponsored by imperial Russia – through Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen’s expedition of 1819–21. In this same year the US discussed with the UK a new proposal based on the Chilean idea of a ‘standstill’ agreement. The UK responded positively to this proposal and the US initiated informal discussions with Chile, Australia and New Zealand.21 US energy to solve the Antarctic Problem dissipated with the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. At the same time differences between key US agencies (the Department of Defense opposed the ‘standstill’ proposal, whereas the Department of State supported it) meant that the ‘standstill’ proposal became moribund.22 The first sustained attempt to solve the Antarctic Problem ended in failure, and in 1952 and 1953 increasing tensions (diplomatic and in Antarctica) emerged between Chile, Argentina and the UK. By the mid-­1950s collaborative science activities were emerging – in 1956 and 1957 US scientists spent the winter at the USSR’s Mirny station, while Soviet scientists worked at the Little America station. The Director of the Australian Antarctic Division (Philip Law) had visited the Mirny station during its construction in the austral summer of 1956 as part of an Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition, and the Soviet station leader was keen to take advice from the more experienced Australians.23

GETTING TO YES (OR SIDESTEPPING A NYET) – THE ANTARCTIC CONFERENCE The development of the Antarctic Treaty was a significant diplomatic effort, balancing differing aspirations and interests. This process included sixty preparatory meetings and a formal diplomatic Conference on Antarctica that began on 15 October 1959 and concluded with the Antarctic Treaty being opened for signature on 1 December 1959.24 There was some opposition within the US government and other states to the involvement of the USSR.25 Australia supported the involvement of the USSR, a position that gained broader support as it became clear during and after the IGY that the USSR was going to remain on the continent. The resolution of the differences between claimants and others through Chilean Julio Escudero’s modus vivendi proposal, which limited any

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 234

21/12/2016 10:11

The originals  235 further territorial claims while allowing states to recognise existing claims, was a key accomplishment.26 This, together with significant diplomatic efforts by the Australian delegation, was critical in ensuring the USSR’s support for the Antarctic Treaty.27 All parties at the conference had undertaken scientific work in Antarctica during the IGY. As clearly the most experienced Antarctic nations in the period, with the possible exception of South Africa, having proved their credentials, it is understandable that they privileged themselves under Article IX in this way. Article IX simply formalised the steps that the original twelve had already undertaken.

THE ANTARCTIC TREATY The Treaty, while incorporating commitments to scientific collaboration, also satisfied the originals’ security concerns by demilitarising the continent, creating the first nuclear free zone,28 and establishing an inspection regime that has been utilised as a model in later international regimes.29 The first meeting of Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties (the first ATCM) was held in Canberra from 10 to 14 July 1961. Addressing this meeting, Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies noted the intense negotiations that had accompanied the drafting of the Antarctic Treaty30 and commented favourably on the way in which the parties had accommodated different views and interests within this instrument for the pursuit of peaceful scientific exploration.31

PEACEFUL USE The Antarctic Treaty was negotiated at the height of the Cold War, and when tensions over territorial claims on the Antarctic Peninsula were also high. The treaty parties have been remarkably successful in quarantining Antarctica from conflict, and contention, notwithstanding the challenges posed, inter alia, by the United Kingdom–Argentina conflict over the Falkland Islands/Malvinas and internal tensions related to the position of apartheid South Africa as an ATCP – the latter given new edge in the 1980s through the annual ‘Question of Antarctica’ debates in the UN General Assembly.32 Indeed, one example of the conflict management role of original signatories to the Antarctic Treaty is the lead role taken by Australia in responding to Malaysia’s critique and working with other ATCPs in developing and projecting these responses.33

SCIENCE The majority of the original signatories conduct a large proportion of the scientific effort on the continent and work with the Antarctic Treaty Consultative meetings. It is clear that ‘science is currency of credibility’ in the Antarctic.34 Dudeney and Walton provide an analysis of contributions to the ATCMs between 1992 and 2010.35 Nine of the twelve original signatories are ranked 1 to 10 by the number of working papers produced at ATCMs. Dudeney and Walton use data on the number of scientific publications on Antarctica normalised by the GDP of the country. In this analysis New Zealand ranks

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 235

21/12/2016 10:11

236  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica first followed by Chile, Argentina, Australia and the UK and Norway, all original signatories and, as Dudeney and Walton note, all claimants.36 Bartley has undertaken a similar exercise in terms of parties’ engagement with the Commission on the Conservation of Antarctic Living Marine Resources (CCAMLR). This analysis investigated the contributions made by members to the work of CCAMLR as measured by the numbers of Working and Background Papers to CCAMLR.37 In accepting that the submission of papers does not necessarily imply influence, it is nonetheless noteworthy that the original signatories to CCAMLR (the original Antarctic Treaty signatories plus the then West Germany and Poland) contributed 84 per cent of the papers for consideration at the Commission between CCAMLR I in 1982 and CCAMLR XXX in 2012.38

THE CONTEMPORARY SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CONTINUING SPECIAL STATUS OF THE ORIGINALS Throughout the life of the ATS, consensus within the ATCM has been tested from time to time, especially during the 1980s and early 1990 when a significant debate took place within the system as to whether mining should be permitted in Antarctica or whether a comprehensive environmental protection regime should be developed. That debate was eventually resolved after a significant diplomatic ‘about-­turn’ led by Australia and France in 1989, that shifted the balance of positions among Consultative Parties and resulted in the rejection of the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities (CRAMRA),39 and instead opted to promote a new environmental regime that explicitly prohibited mineral resource activities.40 The adoption and entry into force of the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (the Madrid Protocol)41 was a key factor in refocusing efforts on environmental and resources management. This initiative, spearheaded by Australia and France (later joined by Belgium), was developed in response to Australia and France rejecting the CRAMRA. A key aspect of the Protocol is the moratorium it places upon mineral resource activities in Antarctica. The moratorium is of indefinite duration but can be modified at any time if all parties agree. The Madrid Protocol includes the possibility of a review after 2048, after which review there is the potential for renegotiation of the moratorium subject to three quarters of the current Consultative Parties agreeing, there being a legal regime for controlling mining in force, and the sovereign interests of parties safeguarded.42

THE INFLUENCE OF THE ORIGINALS The twelve original signatories have special standing among the now twenty-­nine ATCPs, yet as the numbers of consultative parties grow they are in a minority. It is clear that the robustness of the ATS is maintained as new states accede, although a key test will come as these states apply to gain ATCP status. It is likely that the emphasis for ATCP status will be on scientific research as a key indicator of interest. This suggests likely answers to the questions posed earlier in this article. As the ATS has evolved over almost sixty years it is likely that the meaning of ‘substantial research

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 236

21/12/2016 10:11

The originals  237 activity’ will continue to be reassessed. It is also clear that the original signatories remain important actors within the ATS. As shown in several analyses, the parties provide considerable leverage within the system. The originals have both historical connections to, and significant current work, in Antarctica. As a result it is unlikely that any acceding states will challenge an original signatory’s capacity in terms of the standard applied under Article IX.

CONCLUSION The resilience and evolution of the ATS owes much to the work of key original signatory states who have been active in developing new instruments and arrangements for the system. The Originals have been the driving force and strong supporters of the ATS. Influence within the ATS is more than ‘diplomatic clout’ as measured through successes in the establishment and maintenance of international instruments. The twelve original signatories’ commitment to the peaceful use of the continent and Antarctic science is a further arena of influence, and leadership. As such the original signatories have established the norms and values underpinning the system. Despite their longstanding commitment, and the persistence of these values, there are, however, a number of likely challenges on the future Antarctic agenda. The first is ensuring that the ATS remains responsive and effective. In this the original signatories can act positively in supporting the accession of new states, providing opportunities for collaborative science and logistics, while minimising footprint and impact. A second, related area is to ensure the ongoing implementation, and management of the Antarctic environmental protection regime and the linking of science under its auspices to climate change science. In many respects the twin pillars of the ATS, peace and science, have become the prime international justifications for the Antarctic regime and are regularly held up as models for the international community to emulate.43

NOTES   1. 1 December 1959, 402 UNTS 71.   2. Antarctic Treaty Article IX (on Treaty Meetings) states, inter-­alia, that: 1 Representatives of the Contracting Parties named in the preamble to the present Treaty shall meet at the City of Canberra within two months after the date of entry into force of the Treaty, and thereafter at suitable intervals and places, for the purpose of exchanging information, consulting together on matters of common interest pertaining to Antarctica, and formulating and considering, and recommending to their Governments, measures in furtherance of the principles and objectives of the Treaty, including measures regarding: 1 2 3 4 5 6

use of Antarctica for peaceful purposes only; facilitation of scientific research in Antarctica; facilitation of international scientific cooperation in Antarctica; facilitation of the exercise of the rights of inspection provided for in Article VII of the Treaty; questions relating to the exercise of jurisdiction in Antarctica; preservation and conservation of living resources in Antarctica.

2. Each Contracting Party which has become a party to the present Treaty by accession under Article XIII shall be entitled to appoint representatives to participate in the meetings referred to in paragraph 1 of the present Article, during such times as that Contracting Party demonstrates its interest in Antarctica

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 237

21/12/2016 10:11

238  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica by conducting substantial research activity there, such as the establishment of a scientific station or the despatch of a scientific expedition.   3. Antarctic Treaty Art IX (2).   4. In some cases (for example, Belgium) the level of activity has not been consistent.   5. Dudeney and Walton 2012a. The term ‘originals’ is not an official term nor is it used informally. It is used in this chapter as convenient label.   6. The dating of the heroic era is clearly arguable. Dr John Murray’s lecture to the Royal Geographical Society that urged more research in Antarctica to ‘resolve the outstanding geographical questions still posed in the south’ was delivered in 1893. 1898 saw the first wintering over when Adrian de Gerlache’s Belgian Antarctic Expedition ship the Belgica was trapped in ice. The death of Shackleton in 1922 is a convenient book-­end to this period of scientific research and discovery – and some of the claims of territory – that provide major sources of support for the originals’ later claims of primacy in Antarctic affairs.   7. In the celebrated 1951 volume of that name by E.W. Hunter Christie.   8. Dudeney and Walton 2012b.   9. France made a claim by decree on 29 March 1924 in the Journal Officiel but did not give ‘precise statements of the limits of this region’, Miller 1927, 508. After concern from Australia and the United Kingdom an agreed boundary for the claim was reached in March 1938. See also Joyner 1982. 10. Pinochet De La Barra (1955) suggests Chile had ‘perfected her title in Antarctica’ in 1906. 11. Joyner 1982. Joyner notes that while Argentina made statements relating to its claim in the early 1940s, official maps published in December 1946 formally articulated its territorial claim. 12. Beck 1983. The United Kingdom’s position in the 1940s was influenced by the real politik of East Antarctica, particularly the French and Norwegian claims, with relations with the latter linking to other issues such as the Spitsbergen Treaty. See Barrett 2009. 13. Ibid. 14. Hall 1989, 137. 15. Hall 1989. 16. Stevenson 2010. 17. Treaty of peace with Japan, signed at San Francisco 8 September 1951: Chapter II 2 (e) ‘Japan renounces all claim to any right or title to or interest in connection with any part of the Antarctic area, whether deriving from the activities of Japanese nationals or otherwise.’ 18. See, for example, Roberts, Dodds and van der Watt 2013. 19. Hall 1994; Hall 2002. 20. Hall 1989. 21. Hall 1994; Hall 2002. 22. Hall and Kawaja 2011. 23. Bowden 2011. 24. Beck 1985. 25. Hall 2002. 26. Hall and Kawaja 2011. 27. Hall 2002. 28. Although this focused on nuclear weapons and not on the peaceful use of nuclear energy. 29. See among others, Bergin and Haward 2007; Haward and Griffiths 2011. 30. Hemmings and Jabour 2011. 31. Rowe 2002; Haward and Griffiths 2011. 32. See Chapter 17 in this volume. 33. Tepper and Haward 2005; Haward and Mason 2011. 34. Herr and Hall 1989; Jabour and Haward 2009. 35. Dudeney and Walton 2012a. 36. Dudeney and Walton 2012a, 3. 37. Bartley 2012. 38. Bartley 2012, 38. 39. 2 June 1988, 27 ILM 868. 40. Bergin 1991. 41. 4 October 1991, 30 ILM 1461. 42. Australian Antarctic Division. The Madrid Protocol http://www.antarctica.gov.au/law-­ and-­ treaty/ the-­madrid-­protocol. 43. The Antarctic Treaty has been raised as an exemplar for areas of disputed sovereignty – for example the South China Sea. The inspection regime under the Antarctic Treaty was used as the basis for the ‘any time, anywhere’ inspection system established by the Chemical Weapons Treaty 1993.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 238

21/12/2016 10:11

The originals  239

REFERENCES Baird, R. 2004. Can Australia assert an extended continental shelf off the Australian Antarctic Territory consistent with the Law of the Sea and within the constraints of the Antarctic Treaty? Maritime Studies 138: 1–19. Barrett, N.D. 2009. Norway and the ‘winning’ of Australian Antarctica. 2009. Polar Record 45 (235): 360–67. Bartley, R. 2012. Member engagement and influence in the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources and its Scientific Committee – a thirty-­year analysis. Unpublished Master of Public Policy Thesis, School of Government, University of Tasmania. Beck, P.J. 1985. Preparatory meetings for the Antarctic Treaty 1958–9. Polar Record 22 (141): 653–64. Bergin, A. 1991. The politics of Antarctic minerals: The greening of white Australia. Australian Journal of Political Science 26 (2): 216–39. Bergin, A. and Haward, M. 2007. Frozen Assets: Securing Australia’s Antarctic Future. Strategic Insight No. 34, Canberra: Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Bowden, T. 2011. Phillip Garth Law: The architect of ANARE. Pages 140–46 in Haward, M. and Griffiths, T. (eds), Australia and the Antarctic Treaty System: Fifty Years of Influence. Sydney: UNSW Press. Christie, E.W. Hunter 1951. The Antarctic Problem. London: George Allen and Unwin. Dudeney, J.R. and Walton, D.W.H. 2012a. Leadership in politics and science within the Antarctic Treaty. Polar Research 31. Available at: http://www.polarresearch.net/index.php/polar/article/view/11075. Date accessed: 22 February 2015. :http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/polar.v31i0.11075. Dudeney, J.R. and Walton, D.W.H. 2012b. From Scotia to ‘Operation Tabarin’: Developing British policy for Antarctica. Polar Record 48 (247): 342–60. Hall, H.R. 1989. The ‘open door’ into Antarctica: An explanation of the Hughes Doctine. Polar Record 25 (153): 137–40. Hall, H.R. 1994. ‘International regime formation and leadership: The origins of the Antarctic Treaty’. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Tasmania. Hall, H.R. 2002. Casey and the negotiation of the Antarctic Treaty. Pages 26–33 in Jabour-­Green, J. and Haward, M. (eds), The Antarctic: Past, Present and Future, Research Report 28, Hobart: Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre. Hall, H.R. and Kawaja, M. 2011. Australia and the negotiation of the Antarctic Treaty. Pages 68–96 in Haward, M. and Griffiths, T. (eds), Australia and the Antarctic Treaty System: Fifty Years of Influence. Sydney: UNSW Press. Haward, M. 2009. The Law of the Sea Convention and the Antarctic Treaty System: constraints or complementarity. Pages 231–51 in Hong, S.-­Y. and van Dyke, J. (eds), Maritime Boundary Disputes, Settlement Processes, and the Law of the Sea. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff. Haward, M. 2012. Climate change: Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, science, law and policy. Pages 107–26 in Warner, R. and Schofield, C. (eds), Climate Change and the Oceans: Gauging the Legal and Policy Currents in the Asia Pacific and Beyond. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Haward, M. and Griffiths, T. 2011. Introduction. Pages1–8 in Haward, M. and Griffiths, T. (eds), Australia and the Antarctic Treaty System: Fifty Years of Influence. Sydney: UNSW Press. Haward, M. and Mason, D. 2011. Australia, the United Nations and the question of Antarctica. Pages 202–21 in Haward, M. and Griffiths, T. (eds), Australia and the Antarctic Treaty System: Fifty Years of Influence. Sydney: UNSW Press. Hemmings, A.D. and Jabour, J. 2011. Already a special case? Australian Antarctic Policy in the first decade of the Antarctic Treaty. Pages 118–37 in Haward, M. and Griffiths, T. (eds), Australia and the Antarctic Treaty System: Fifty Years of Influence. Sydney: UNSW Press. Herr, R.A. and Hall, H.R. 1989. Science as currency and the currency of science. Pages 13–23 in Handmer, J. (ed.), Antarctica: Policies and Policy Development, CRES Resource and Environmental Studies No. 1, Canberra: CRES, ANU. Jabour, J. and Haward, M. 2009. Antarctic science, politics and IPY legacies. Pages 101–12 in Shadian, J.M. and Tennberg, M. (eds), Legacies and Change in Polar Sciences: Historical, Legal and Political Reflections on the International Polar Year, Farnham: Ashgate. Joyner, C.C. 1982. The Law of the Sea and Antarctica, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Kaye, S.B. and Rothwell, D.R. 2002. Southern Ocean boundaries and maritime claims: another Antarctic ­challenge for the law of the sea? Ocean Development and International Law 33: 359–89. Miller, D.H. 1927. National rights in the Antarctic. Foreign Affairs 5 (3): 508–10. Pinochet de la Barra, O. 1955. Chilean Sovereignty in Antarctica, Santiago: Editorial del Pacifico. Roberts, P., Dodds, K. and van der Watt, L.-­M. 2013. But Why Do You Go There? Norway and South Africa in the Antarctic during the 1950s. In Sverker Sörlin (ed.), Science, Geopolitics and Culture in the Polar Region: Norden Beyond Borders, Farnham, Ashgate. Rowe, R. 2002. The Antarctic Treaty: past and present. Pages 7–17 in Jabour-­Green, J. and Haward, M. (eds),

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 239

21/12/2016 10:11

240  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica The Antarctic: Past, Present and Future, Research Report 28, Hobart: Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre. Stevenson, W.R. 2010. Science, the South Pole and the Japanese Expedition of 1910–1912. Endeavour 35 (4): 160–8. Tepper, R. and Haward, M. 2005. The development of Malaysia’s position on Antarctica: 1982–2004. Polar Record 41 (217): 113–24. Vigni, P. 2001. Antarctic maritime claims: ‘Frozen sovereignty’ and the law of the sea. Pages 85–104 in Oude Elferink, A.G. and Rothwell, D.R. (eds), The Law of the Sea and Polar Maritime Delimitation and Jurisdiction. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 240

21/12/2016 10:11

16.  Territorial claims and coastal states Patrizia Vigni and Francesco Francioni

PRELIMINARY REMARKS Antarctica and the southern hemisphere have attracted the interest of explorers and states since the seventeenth century. But, the first people in Antarctica only arrived at the end of the nineteenth century. Following early exploratory expeditions, some states claimed sovereign rights over Antarctica on different legal grounds.1 These states are known as ‘Claimant States’.2 Some of them claim sovereignty simply because the early Antarctic explorers were from those states. Norway is a case in point.3 Others, such as Argentina, Australia, Chile and New Zealand, founded, and continue to claim their rights to Antarctica by their geographic proximity to the continent. Argentina and Chile also invoked the uti possidetis juris principle to support the validity of their claims to Antarctic territories.4 Moreover, Australia and New Zealand founded the legitimacy of their claims on the transfer of sovereign powers from the British Empire to their governments.5 Other Claimant States, such as France and the United Kingdom (UK), base their claims on the theory of sectors. According to this theory, states may invoke sovereignty over the area that is included in the sector of a circle having its centre in the South Pole and outer limit in the section of the circle corresponding to the coastline of the territories over which these states enjoy undisputable sovereign rights.6 In order to reinforce the legitimacy of their sovereign claims, these states adopted specific national legislation relating to their claimed Antarctic territories. This legislation particularly concerns the delimitation of maritime areas surrounding these territories, such as the territorial sea, continental shelf and, in recent times, exclusive economic zone.7 At the beginning of the twentieth century, states claiming sovereignty over Antarctica mutually recognized other claims.8 However, after World War II, the geographic delimitation of Antarctic claimed territories highlighted some overlaps between the Argentine, British and Chilean claims. These circumstances raised serious disputes that risked leading to an armed conflict.9 In 1950, the UK submitted an application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ)10 against Argentina and Chile in order to resolve the question of the overlapping of their Antarctic territorial claims. Waldock argued11 this complaint was also aimed at avoiding the extinguishment of claims by prescription. However, the Court rejected the case on the grounds of lack of jurisdiction. In the same period, the United States and the Soviet Union demonstrated their interests in the strategic position of the Antarctic continent, as a potential functional centre for the control of the southern hemisphere. With the aim of resolving these disputes, an international conference was organized during the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year (IGY). The conference helped to establish a programme of cooperation for Antarctic scientific research and, accordingly, the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR) which was aimed at coordinating Antarctic research programmes, organized 241

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 241

21/12/2016 10:11

242  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica by different States. As a result, in 1959, the seven Claimant States, the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, Belgium and South Africa concluded the Antarctic Treaty as an instrument to prevent the escalation of the disputes arising from sovereignty claims and to promote scientific cooperation in the region. Following the Treaty’s entry into force, regular meetings of the contracting parties (Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings – ATCMs) were convened a standard-­setting practice began, which continues today, and further international binding instruments were adopted, which together constitute the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS).12

ANTARCTIC TERRITORIAL AND MARITIME CLAIMS UNDER THE ANTARCTIC TREATY Territorial Claims The Antarctic Treaty lays down a number of general principles which set aside the traditional rules of international law relating to the exercise of jurisdiction over the territorial and maritime areas that are included in the geographic scope of the Treaty, namely, the area south of 60 degrees south latitude, including all ice shelves.13 The Treaty bypasses the dichotomy between areas subject to state jurisdiction and zones situated outside national jurisdiction, such as the high seas, on which states generally enjoy large freedom of action. The new criterion adopted by the Antarctic Treaty to manage Antarctica is the so-­called ‘bifocal approach’. This approach freezes the prerogatives of Claimant States without denying their rights to claim as established in Article IV paragraph 1.14 Simultaneously, paragraph 2 of Article IV denies the possibility of making new claims to sovereignty over Antarctica or of enlarging the existing ones.15 So, Claimant States can continue to consider Antarctic claimed territories as theirs as long as their behaviour is consistent with ATS obligations. On the other hand, States party to the Treaty, which do not recognize such claims, the so-­called non-­Claimant States, can interpret and apply the provisions of the Treaty in the same manner as if these claims do not exist. Although the adoption of the ‘bifocal approach’ prevents Claimant States from exercising their sovereign rights in a full manner, the existence of these claims has prevented the recognition of the status of Antarctica as a part of the common heritage of humankind.16 In fact, while Antarctica partakes of the nature of a global common and presents many of the characteristics that define the concept of the ‘common heritage’,17 the Antarctic Treaty presents contradictory features that, on the one hand, distinguish it from the common heritage and, on the other hand, appear to be consonant with it. First, while common heritage completely sets aside the principle of State sovereignty, Article IV of the Treaty does not expressly deny the latter principle. It only freezes sovereignty claims to permit the functioning of a system of international cooperation. At the same time it leaves open the status of the portion of Antarctica that is not subject to any sovereignty claim.18 Second, the principle of common heritage requires that all states have the same rights and duties with respect to the spaces and resources to which common heritage applies. In contrast, the Antarctic Treaty invests broader governing powers in the Consultative

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 242

21/12/2016 10:11

Territorial claims and coastal states  243 Parties, that is, the original Parties to the Treaty and those States that have shown serious commitment to Antarctica by ‘conducting substantial scientific activity there’.19 At the same time the spirit of the common heritage principle informs the treaty clause on freedom of access and scientific research in Antarctica (Article II) and the fundamental ‘peaceful purposes’ clause (Article I). Finally, the common heritage principle is based on the assumption that there must be an equitable sharing of the resources appertaining to the common heritage between all members of the international community. No similar principle exists in the original Treaty. And yet, when the issue of Antarctic mineral resources emerged in the 1980s, the road taken by the Consultative Parties was that of setting aside national claims to natural resources, to prohibit mineral exploitation, and to proclaim Antarctica as ‘a natural reserve devoted to peace and science’.20 A new variant on the common heritage principle, which also appears to be relevant for the sui generis legal status of Antarctica, is the concept of the ‘common concern of humankind’. This concept is included in some international agreements (such as the Convention on Biological Diversity),21 and is also referred to in a resolution of the UN General Assembly.22 Although it seems to be correct to consider the preservation of the Antarctic environment in the interest of all humankind, the ‘common concern’ principle nevertheless avoids the attribution to Antarctica of the status of res communis omnium. Thus, the ‘common concern’ principle can be used to resolve the potentially endless conflict between the concept of ‘common heritage of humankind’ and the content of Article IV of the Antarctic Treaty, which, although precluding new claims of sovereignty on Antarctic territory, does not definitively negate the legitimacy of pre-­existing claims. In fact, the common concern principle is not incompatible with the concept of sovereignty. This characteristic of the common concern principle seems to be highly significant since, nowadays, the coexistence of the need to preserve the environment and the perceived need to promote the economic growth of states is commonplace. This is why the principle is often associated with the concepts of sustainable development and in the interests of future generations. Moreover, the common concern rule is important for its content. ‘Common concern’ means interest, at the global level, in preserving certain aspects of the environment. Such an interest requires states to behave consistently so as to preserve areas of common interest such as the ozone layer, climate and biodiversity. These kinds of goods are called global commons, and states must preserve them in the interest of humankind as a whole, even if these goods are subject to state sovereignty.23 The common concern principle is adaptable to the peculiar legal status of Antarctica as it results from the adoption of the ‘bifocal approach’. Antarctic Maritime Claims Claimant States’ proclamations Besides territorial claims, almost all Claimant States have declared maritime zones adjacent to their claimed Antarctic territories by adopting specific national legislation or by including territorial and maritime claims in the same act.24 Claimant States have also updated national legislation25 to take into account the development of the international law of the sea and, in particular, the norms of UNCLOS.26

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 243

21/12/2016 10:11

244  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica By contrast, non-­Claimant States have always denied the legitimacy of both territorial and maritime claims. These contrasting positions have induced Claimant States to keep a cautious attitude in asserting their maritime claims. In fact, although the existence of coastal state sovereignty over the territorial sea and sovereign rights over the continental shelf have been recognized by international law for a long time, Claimant States have felt the necessity of making an express proclamation of their claims over such areas. Moreover, notwithstanding the early origin of claims over Antarctic territories, the proclamation of corresponding maritime zones has taken place quite recently. In contrast to the territorial sea and continental shelf, an express declaration is required for the establishment of the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) under international law. Therefore, Claimant States’ proclamations of an EEZ adjacent to their Antarctic territories does not seem to differ from similar declarations in other areas of the planet. Indeed, formal proclamations are frequently used by states to assert sovereign rights over maritime areas other than the Antarctic seas in order to render other states aware of these claims. However, in certain circumstances, such as the assertion of coastal state sovereignty over the territorial sea, an express proclamation seems to be unnecessary or, at least, redundant owing to the existence of an indisputable rule of customary international law which, ipso iure, recognizes a territorial sea to any state endowed by nature with a coastline.27 The initial claims over Antarctic maritime areas concerned the continental shelf. Chile proclaimed its continental shelf in 1947,28 Australia in 1953 and Argentina in 1966.29 The original purpose of the proclamation, by Claimant States, of the continental shelf within the Antarctic area must be considered a means to asserting their sovereign rights, in p ­ articular vis-­à-­vis other Claimant States. More recently, some states have also declared an EEZ corresponding to their claimed Antarctic territories. Australia proclaimed an Antarctic Fishing Zone in 1979, which was followed by the declaration of an EEZ in 1994. However, in the same act including the declaration of an EEZ, Australia has expressed its intent to abstain from exercising, vis-­ à-­vis foreign vessels and persons, the exclusive rights which it enjoys within its EEZ under provisions of the UNCLOS. Similarly, the UK statute establishing a maritime zone for British sub-­Antarctic islands explicitly denies the possibility of exercising enforcement powers, which it otherwise has under the Statute, over those waters which fall within the geographic scope of the Antarctic Treaty.30 A peculiar claim over the Antarctic seas is that resulting from the proclamation of the ‘presential sea’ made by Chile at the beginning of 1990s.31 Under the presential sea doctrine, Chile claims the right to control and participate in any activity carried out by other states in an area of the high seas adjacent to the Chilean coast. This claimed area is quite vast. Its southern outer limit extends to the Antarctic Peninsula. Chile bases this right on its interest in protecting the marine environment and resources in the waters adjacent to its coast. So far, there is no international norm or principle that may provide a legal basis for the establishment of a similar area. In addition, in the 2014 ICJ’s judgement relating to the dispute concerning the delimitation of the EEZ between Chile and Peru,32 the Court established that a portion of the high sea that Chile considered to be part of its presential sea had to be assigned to Peru. Although the ICJ did not expressly mention the concept of presential sea, its little concern for the Chilean proclamation of this area clearly demonstrates that this concept has so far not found any grounds for legitimacy under international law.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 244

21/12/2016 10:11

Territorial claims and coastal states  245 Finally, Claimant States have recently submitted proposals concerning the extension of their Antarctic continental shelf beyond the limit that is established by the UNCLOS. In fact, paragraph 7 of Article 76 of the Convention allows States to extend the outer boundary of their continental shelf in accordance with the recommendations of the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (hereafter referred to as the UNCLOS Commission). States’ proposals must be submitted to the UNCLOS Commission within ten years from the date of ratification of the Convention.33 Thus, Claimant States have rushed to comply with this deadline in the last decade. Among Claimant States, Australia, Argentina and Norway submitted a proposal affecting the area below 60° south latitude. France and the United Kingdom only proposed the extension of their continental shelf corresponding to their sub-­Antarctic islands that are located beyond the Treaty area and over which sovereignty is not subject to the ‘freezing’ regime of Article IV.34 In sum, maritime claims in Antarctica are to some extent different from maritime claims in other regions of the world. Claimant States, in declaring maritime zones within the Antarctic area, seem to have somehow paid special attention to the peculiar legal status of the area. But these claims continue to raise special issues, as we shall discuss below. The legitimacy of Antarctic maritime claims The existence of claims to sovereignty over Antarctic waters does not make such claims automatically admissible from the legal point of view. Although the extension of the jurisdiction of states over maritime areas adjacent to their territories is an axiom of contemporary international law, one must take into account the peculiarity of the legal regime established by the Antarctic Treaty. The main crucial problem concerning the applicability of the law of the sea to the Antarctic marine area involves the contested existence of coastal states in Antarctica. If territorial sovereignty is recognized, then its corollary is the recognition of a maritime zone pertaining to the ‘coastal state’. If sovereignty is denied, then the possibility of its projection into maritime areas also becomes problematic. While Article VI of the Antarctic Treaty precisely identifies the Treaty scope, namely the area below 60° south latitude, it leaves some ambiguities as to the status of the seas included in this area. In fact, Article VI excludes the application of Treaty norms to the high seas.35 This exclusion is clearly due to the intention of the States party to the Antarctic Treaty to avoid conflicts with the law of the sea as it existed at the time of the entry into force of the Treaty. Despite this peremptory statement, Article VI nevertheless fails to define which Antarctic waters may be considered as ‘high seas’. The legitimacy of the existence of Antarctic maritime zones must be assessed both under the law of the sea and by ATS norms, because the States party to the Antarctic Treaty are bound by both these legal regimes. According to some authors, the combined interpretation of Articles IV and VI of the Treaty would only make Article IV applicable to territorial claims, since maritime claims are not mentioned by it. Moreover, the wording of Article VI, which prevents the Antarctic Treaty from prejudicing the rights of states in the high seas, would imply that all Antarctic waters must be included in the category of the high seas.36 This solution could be attractive, especially in order to resolve the problem caused by the existence of different legal regimes applicable to Antarctic coasts. One can distinguish between three types

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 245

21/12/2016 10:11

246  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica of areas: maritime zones corresponding to claimed territories; maritime areas that are claimed from the same territory by different states; and, waters off the unclaimed sector of Antarctica.37 The result would be that the waters surrounding the same continent would be subject to three different legal regimes. However, the view which considers all Antarctic waters as international sea seems to be incompatible with general rules of international law under which the right to maritime zones cannot be separated from the sovereignty over corresponding territories.38 This is particularly so with regard to the territorial sea and the continental shelf. In fact, under Articles 2 and 77 of the UNCLOS, a state has sovereignty over the territorial sea and sovereign rights over the continental shelf corresponding to its coast.39 This does not require the recognition of the international community, but immediately derives from the sovereignty over coastal territories.40 Title to the territorial sea and continental shelf in the Antarctic seas cannot be denied a priori under the ATS. In fact, no ATS norm expressly rejects the possibility of having such maritime zones.41 Article IV of the Antarctic Treaty safeguards previously asserted rights or claims. Thus, on the basis of this norm, Claimant States could argue that their sovereign rights over Antarctic territories include corresponding sovereign rights over adjacent maritime zones. Against this argument one may object that the freezing of claims with the 1959 Treaty entailed that ‘no new claim, or enlargement of an existing claim . . . shall be allowed while the present treaty is in force’. This raises the interesting inter-­temporal question whether at the critical date of the conclusion of the Antarctic Treaty – 1959 – ‘existing claims’ also included maritime zones. As far as the continental shelf is concerned, the answer would be ‘yes’ for Chile and Australia, which proclaimed it in 1947 and 1953, respectively, but it would be ‘no’ for Argentina which proclaimed it only in 1966, and all the more so for the subsequent proclamations of EEZs. In this regard, we must recall that the international law of the sea provides for different obligations within the various maritime areas. One of the most important distinguishing factors is that an EEZ and the extension of the continental shelf beyond 200 miles, unlike the territorial sea and the continental shelf, have to be expressly declared by the coastal State. Thus, the problem of the legitimacy of EEZs and extensions of the continental shelf in Antarctica calls for a separate analysis. First of all, the legitimacy of Antarctic EEZs and extensions of continental shelves seems to be precluded by the fact that, at the time of the entry into force of the Antarctic Treaty, the concept of the EEZ was far from being even hypothesized at the international level.42 So, as we have already pointed out above, the declaration of an EEZ raises the question whether international norms, which did not exist at the time of the creation of the Antarctic regime, can nevertheless be used to interpret the text of the Antarctic Treaty.43 No express answer to this question is given by the Antarctic Treaty or other ATS instruments. In this situation, one may opt for an evolutionary interpretation of the Treaty in light of the dynamic transformation of general international law, and in light of Article 31 (3)(c) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which would prevent relegating the Antarctic Treaty to a status of clinical isolation.44 But against such an approach one can raise the objection that the Antarctic Treaty establishes a special system, based on the need for a special accommodation, both between conflicting sovereignty claims and between Claimant States and the rest

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 246

21/12/2016 10:11

Territorial claims and coastal states  247 of  the  international community, which does not recognize the legal validity of such claims. Second, as we have already mentioned, non-­Claimant States consider that the declaration of the EEZ and extension of the outer limit of the continental shelf are incompatible with the wording of paragraph 2 of Article IV of the Antarctic Treaty, which prohibits new claims or the enlargement of the existing claims. Such incompatibility appears even more evident if one considers that, unlike the territorial sea and the continental shelf, the existence of the EEZ and the extension of the continental shelf beyond 200 miles require an express declaration or proposal by the coastal State.45 The enactment of such declaration or proposal pursuant to UNCLOS could thus be considered to be a breach of Article IV of the Antarctic Treaty, since it prohibits any new claim or, at least, an enlargement of sovereignty in Antarctica. Contrary to this view, one author has affirmed that the declaration of an EEZ cannot be considered as a new claim, since coastal states’ rights are not sovereign rights over the EEZ, but only exclusive rights to exploit resources.46 But this distinction carries no weight. Article IV of the Antarctic Treaty does not distinguish between sovereign rights and exclusive rights of Claimant States. It speaks generally of ‘claims’. The ‘telos’ of this norm is clear: to establish a stand-­still clause and to block further claims to any form of appropriation of Antarctica and, at the same time, to safeguard existing claims. Therefore, under the Treaty, exclusive rights produce the same effects as sovereign rights. Some other authors support the idea that the limitations established by Article IV on the enlargement of existing claims to claims only applies to territorial claims. Therefore, the expressions ‘new claim’ and ‘enlargement’ would merely concern the extension of a territorial claim to the unclaimed sector of Antarctica or to the territories over which other states claim s­ overeignty.47 Such a construction has no logical basis, since maritime claims are inextricably linked to territorial claims and they stand or fail depending on the scope of the original territorial claims. Besides, it is contradictory in so far as in order to support the legitimacy of maritime claims, one must interpret the expression ‘claim’ included in paragraph 1 of Article IV so extensively as to embody both territorial and maritime claims. Thus, one cannot construe the same expression in paragraph 2 of Article IV in such restrictive a manner as to exclude maritime claims from the scope of this provision. From this perspective, legal arguments supporting the legitimacy of the declaration of the EEZ or extension of the continental shelf in Antarctica appear to be not only controversial in the light of the object and purpose of the Antarctic Treaty but even logically flawed, particularly in the light of their inconsistency with the provisions of the Antarctic Treaty. In its 2008 Recommendation to the Australian proposal for the extension of the continental shelf affecting the area below 60° south latitude, the UNCLOS Commission seems to have taken into account these considerations when it set aside the delimitation of the continental shelf corresponding to the Antarctic Treaty area. The Commission held that the issue of State sovereignty was controversial in this area and thus could not interfere with the delicate ‘legal and political balance’ established by Article IV of the Antarctic Treaty.48 A further argument used by scholars aligned with the position of Claimant States is that the law of sea allows coastal states to declare an EEZ and extend their continental shelf corresponding to the territories over which they claim sovereignty on the basis of the assumption that the ATS must be adapted to changing international law.49 Thus,

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 247

21/12/2016 10:11

248  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica the prohibition of such a declaration could be deemed as a limitation to the previously asserted sovereignty of Claimant States, which is forbidden by paragraph 1 of Article IV of the Antarctic Treaty. In spite of the persistence of these diverging views, as far as practical effects are concerned, the existence of claims over Antarctic maritime zones does not seem to hinder the application of ATS norms. The effective enforcement of ATS provisions requires that the States party to the Antarctic Treaty let Antarctic norms prevail over other international provisions, which are applicable within the Antarctic area. In this regard, it is indisputable that Claimant States, as parties to the Antarctic Treaty, have renounced the exercise of their sovereign rights sanctioned by international law. The most important example in this respect is provided by Article 7 of the Madrid Protocol, which prohibits mineral exploitation in the Antarctic area. In this case, Claimant States have renounced the exercise of the right to exploit mineral resources on land as well as on the continental shelf.50 Similarly, Claimant States have abstained from exercising their power of control over foreign scientific expeditions which take place within claimed Antarctic territories. For example, the Italian Mario Zucchelli station is located in the Antarctic sector claimed by New Zealand, and Italian scientists operate in the zone which should correspond to New Zealand’s territorial sea. However, these scientists have always been considered to be subject solely to Italian jurisdiction. In fact, ATS norms allow the power of control over Antarctic operators on the basis of the criterion of nationality rather than under the principle of territorial sovereignty. The same might be said with regard to the declaration of the EEZ and the extension of the outer limit of the continental shelf that Claimant States have recently made. In fact, since the proclamation of maritime zones within Antarctic waters has not been accompanied by the effective exercise of governmental powers, which correspond to coastal state rights under the law of the sea, Claimant States seem to have accepted that their claims over maritime zones must remain frozen, like territorial claims, in order to permit continuing compliance with the ATS.

CHALLENGES AND EVOLUTION OF THE ‘BIFOCAL APPROACH’ This examination of the current situation of claims to sovereignty over Antarctic territories and their extension to adjacent waters has shown the unambiguous intent of Claimant States to reaffirm their status as territorial sovereigns in Antarctica. The conduct of non-­ Claimant States, by contrast, continues to oppose such claims. The position of international institutions, such as the UNCLOS, is inspired by an attitude of cautious neutrality and deference towards the Antarctic Treaty. This situation leads to the conclusion that, so far, Antarctic maritime claims can neither be fully legitimized nor definitively denied. The disagreement about their well-­foundedness and validity under international law remains, but the existence of the ATS and the continuing commitment of its parties to its respect and implementation put on hold the divergent views on this matter. This does not obscure the fact that the original solution adopted by the drafters of Article IV, aimed at reconciling the existence of claims to sovereignty with the establishment of a regime of international cooperation in the area, may in the long run fall short

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 248

21/12/2016 10:11

Territorial claims and coastal states  249 of legal certainty and formal consistency.51 The declarations of EEZs and the proposal to extensions of the continental shelf by Claimant States are an indication of a possible negative trend that may undermine the present solidity of the ATS. If one wants to look at the glass as ‘half full’, rather than ‘half empty’, the concrete consequences of Antarctic maritime claims can be minimized. The assertion of claims over the Antarctic continental shelf and maritime zones has been accompanied by self-­restraint in the exercise of corresponding sovereign powers. Claimant States have abstained from enforcing such powers in the claimed maritime areas and have shown respect for the rights and interests of other parties to the Antarctic Treaty in compliance with Article IV of the Treaty. It seems evident, therefore, that Claimant States recognize the priority of the ATS over other norms and principles of general international law that may give support to their claims. This attitude is consistent with the general principle of ‘cooperation’ that underlies the Antarctic Treaty. Cooperation provides also the basis and the method for innovative solutions to the legal status and management of Antarctica. Article IV and its ‘bifocal approach’ are the starting point of this process of cooperation. It has already produced significant developments in the ATS in the last few decades.52 An example of such developments can be found in the several provisions of the Madrid Protocol which adopted the criterion of nationality rather than the principle of territorial sovereignty in order to preserve both the rights of Claimant and non-­Claimant States. The Protocol leaves to State authorities the effective control over the implementation of its substantive obligations, such as, environmental assessment procedures and management plans for protected areas. The same criterion has been embraced by the Antarctic Treaty parties when they established a mechanism of enforcement of ATS obligations, such as Annex VI to the Madrid Protocol concerning liability arising from environmental emergencies. The Annex also leaves in the hands of States the control over the operators that intend to carry out activities in Antarctica.53 In fact the State authorizing or, in some way, controlling the activity of an operator is responsible for ascertaining that this operator undertakes preventative measures, adopts contingency plans, and, most importantly, takes response action in cases of environmental emergencies as required by the Liability Annex. In addition, the Annex provides for several types of legal actions that can be brought before domestic judicial organs.54 Moreover, the ‘bifocal approach’ and spirit of cooperation, provided for in the ATS, have also allowed some form of institutionalization of this system, such as the establishment of the Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty. This organ presents some peculiarities vis-­à-­vis other similar international structures, since it is an organ that does not belong to any organization.55 This feature of the Secretariat satisfies both the intention of all Treaty parties of providing the ATS with some useful organizational structure and the will of Claimant States to avoid the risk that such institutionalization may result in the ‘internationalization of Antarctica’.56 Thus, even if the issue of ‘Antarctic sovereignty’ still attracts the interest both of politicians and scholars,57 the conflicting positions of Claimant and non-­Claimant States can still coexist thanks to the peculiar legal regime established by the ATS. Obviously, this still remains a source of weaknesses for the ATS. The Antarctic Treaty parties have recently observed that some problems of jurisdiction may arise in the supervision of activities that are carried out by operators of different nationalities. Thus, stronger

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 249

21/12/2016 10:11

250  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica coordination seems to be required between national authorities that are competent to supervise the organization and performance of human activities in Antarctica. For this purpose, in 2012, a specific intersessional contact group was established by the ATCM to deal with jurisdictional matters.58 Nevertheless, even in its most recent consultations, this group has acknowledged that the criterion of nationality still remains the best rule to establish jurisdiction over private persons operating in Antarctica.59 Most significantly, in no documents of this group can one find a reference to such terms as ‘sovereignty’ or ‘claims’. Thus, the weaknesses and shortcomings of the regime established by Article IV of the Antarctic Treaty, seem so far to have been bypassed by the cooperation of the States parties that have put the preservation of an area of outstanding value, such as Antarctica, at the forefront of their international cooperation. The preservation of the delicate balance established by the original bifocal approach embodied in Article IV of the Treaty, rather than being an element of uncertainty can become a source of the ATS’s strength. This can happen as long as the Claimant States continue to act as agents for the enforcement of the international public good embodied in the Antarctic System, and especially of its basic principles of peaceful use, freedom of access for scientific research and environmental protection.

NOTES  1. See Chapter 13 in this volume. For a historical overview of claims to sovereignty over Antarctica see also http://www.discoveringantarctica.org.uk/resources.php?media=word&page_name=home&#pdf, Territorial claims: a slice of history.   2. Claimant States are Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway and the UK.   3. Following the 1911 Amundsen and 1929 Hjalmar Riiser-­Larsen expeditions, a Norwegian royal proclamation declared Peter I Island and Queen Maud Land as territorial dependencies subject to Norwegian sovereignty.  4. The uti possidetis juris principle recognizes that newly formed sovereign states should have the same borders that existed before their independence. See among others Abi-­Saab 2006, Ratner 1996, and Shaw 1996. Argentina and Chile based their claim on the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas that was concluded between Spain and Portugal to define the boundaries of their colonies in South America and of all undiscovered land south to the Pole. In the view of Argentina and Chile, the uti possidetis juris principle became effective when they achieved independence at the beginning of nineteenth century. For a thorough analysis of this argument see Riffenburgh 2007.  5. In 1923 the British Government appointed the Governor-­ General and Commander-­ in-­ Chief of New Zealand as the Governor of the Ross Dependency. In 1933, a British imperial order transferred territory south of 60° latitude to Australia. Regarding this legislation see Casarini 1996 and Triggs 1986.   6. The external boundary of the Antarctic sectors over which France and the UK claim sovereign rights correspond to the coastline of some sub-­Antarctic islands that are included in French and British overseas territories: namely, Kerguelen and Crozet Islands and South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands, respectively.   7. For an example of this kind of national legislation see the Chilean Decreto Supremo no. 1747, 6 November 1940 from the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores (Diario Oficial, 21 June 1955) proclaiming the Chilean territorial sea.   8. The UK, France, Australia, New Zealand and Norway all recognize each other’s claims. In this regard see Rogan-­Finnemore 2005 and Domaas 2011. The British claim was recognized by Norway when the former applied for whaling licenses in the British-­claimed area. As shown above, the UK recognized Australian and New Zealand claims as they were legitimate successors of the British Empire. See Triggs 1986.   9. Chapter 10 in this volume. 10. Antarctica (United Kingdom v. Argentina) and (United Kingdom v. Chile), in ICJ Reports, 1956, 12 and 15. 11. See Waldock 1963. 12. Chapter 14 in this volume. For a thorough analysis of the ATS, see Watts 1992.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 250

21/12/2016 10:11

Territorial claims and coastal states  251 13. Article VI, paragraph 1 of the Treaty. 14. Article IV, paragraph 1 states: ‘nothing contained in the present Treaty shall be interpreted as: a) a renunciation by any Contracting Party of previously asserted rights of or claims to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica . . . c) prejudicing the position of any Contracting Party as regards its recognition or non-­ recognition of any other State’s rights of or claim or basis of claim to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica’. 15. Article IV, paragraph 2 clarifies: ‘No new claim, or enlargement of an existing claim, to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica shall be asserted while the present Treaty is in force’. 16. See Chapter 9 in this volume. 17. See Francioni 1987. 18. Some authors have highlighted that, at this stage, the application of the concept of common heritage to Antarctica is useless owing to the consolidation of the ATS. See Crawford and Rothwell 1992, while other authors have underscored the importance of the common heritage concept as a functional tool to limit sovereignty in the development of Antarctic resources in the general interest of the international community, Francioni 1986. 19. In this regard, see Suy 1992. 20. Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, 4 October 1991 (1991) 30 ILM 1461 (Madrid Protocol). 21. Rio de Janeiro, 5 June 1992, 1992 ILM 31, 822. 22. A/RES/49/80 of 15 December 1994. This point is highlighted by Charney 1996. 23. For a comprehensive analysis of the ‘common goods’ concept, see Lenzerini and Vrdoljak 2014. 24. See, for example, the Chilean Decreto Supremo no. 1747 of 6 November 1940 from the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, cit. supra. 25. See, for example, Ley 23968 of 14 August 1991, in Boletín Oficial, 5 December 1991 (Argentina); No. 1 Proclamation (Maritime Zone), May 1993 (United Kingdom); and the Australian act establishing an EEZ in Commonwealth of Australia Gazette no. S 290, 29 July 1994. 26. See Chapter 28 in this volume. 27. An example of a formal declaration of the territorial sea is provided by the proclamation made in 1973 by Australia with regard to its Antarctic and sub-­Antarctic territories. See Davis 1998. Other Claimant States have shown a more confident behaviour. For instance, Chile affirmed the existence of a territorial sea corresponding to its Antarctic territories in the same act in which it defined the extent of the territorial claim. See Decreto Supremo no 1747, of November 1940, available at http://www.leychile.cl/ Navegar?idNorma=1017683. Similarly, New Zealand considered that the transfer of sovereignty over the Ross Dependency from the UK included the corresponding territorial sea. See Rothwell 1995. 28. See Bush 1982. 29. For an overview, see Rothwell 1995. 30. See No. 3 Fisheries (Conservation and Management) Ordinance 1993, section 5 (1) (United Kingdom). This concerns the 200-­nautical-­mile zone surrounding the South Sandwich Islands. 31. See Ley no. 19.080 of 28 August 1991, in http://www.leychile.cl/N?i=30447&f=1991-­09-­06&p=. For an overview see Orrego Vicuña 1993. For arguments against the legitimacy of the declaration of the ­‘presential sea’, see Joyner and De Cola 1993 and Clingan 1993. 32. Maritime Dispute (Peru v. Chile), in http://www.icj-­cij.org/docket/files/137/17930.pdf. 33. Although the UNCLOS entered into force in 1994, parties to the Convention decided that the date of commencement of the ten-­year time period for making submissions to the Commission was 13 May 1999 for the States for which the Convention entered into force before 13 May 1999. Report of the Eleventh Meeting of States Parties to the UNCLOS, SPLOS/73. See https://documents-­dds-­ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/ N01/411/52/PDF/N0141152.pdf ?OpenElement. Thus, the actual period was fifteen years long. However, some states, such as Australia, which had already started the procedure, submitted their proposal in accordance with the previous deadline. For an overview see McDorman 2002. 34. Actually, in its 2009 proposal, France declared to reserve its right to submit a future proposal for the extension of the continental shelf corresponding to its claimed Antarctic territories. This declaration raised the objections of some non-­Claimant States, such as Japan and the Netherlands. See http://www.un.org/Depts/ los/clcs_new/submissions_files/submission_fra1.htm. 35. Paragraph 1 of Article VI of the AT states that ‘ . . . nothing in the present Treaty shall prejudice or in any way affect the rights, or the exercise of the rights, of any State under international law with regard to the high seas within that area’. 36. For this view see Birnie 1988 and Caflisch 1990. 37. In the first case, the identity of the coastal state is certain. Such a state could proclaim maritime areas, although their legitimacy is doubtful. In the second case, it is not possible to establish which state has a valid title to territory. Therefore, it would be meaningless for a state to delimit maritime areas since the state in question may not be the legitimate claimant. For the unclaimed sector of Antarctica, the lack of coastal states would prevent the existence of maritime zones.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 251

21/12/2016 10:11

252  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica 38. Some authors think that if a claim to sovereignty was limited to territory, such claim would be ‘a paper one only’. For this view see Rothwell and Kaye 1994. 39. The basic principles embodied in these articles were already included in Article 1 of the 1958 Convention on the Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone, UNTS Vol. 516, No. 7477 and Article 2(1) of the 1958 Convention on the Continental Shelf, UNTS 499, No. 7302. These principles can be, now, considered rules of customary international law. 40. This principle was affirmed by the ICJ in the North Sea Continental Shelf cases (Germany v. Denmark; Germany v. the Netherlands) where the Court recognized the existence of ‘the ipso iure title that international law attributes to (a state) in respect of its continental shelf . . .’, ICJ Reports, 1969, 23. 41. See Watts 1992. 42. Actually, 200-­nautical-­mile zones already existed in Latin America at that time, but their lawfulness was far from being generally recognized. The first reference to such a maritime area was made at the beginning of the 1970s during the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) and it was only in 1982 that the ICJ affirmed that the rule which recognizes coastal state exclusive rights over the EEZ had become a norm of customary international law. See the Case Concerning the Continental Shelf (Tunisia/Libyan Arab Jamahiriya), ICJ Reports 1982, at 18. With regard to the right to exploit marine resources, the Court affirmed that ‘historic rights and titles are more nearly related to the concept of the exclusive economic zone’ and such rights ‘must enjoy respect and be preserved as they have always been by long usage’, ibid. 73, paragraph 100. In contrast, in the dispute between Iceland and the United Kingdom, concerning the delimitation of the Icelandic fishing zone, the Court took into account historic rights in order to recognize the rights of third states to enter the waters adjacent to the coast of another state. See the Fisheries Jurisdiction case (United Kingdom v. Iceland), ICJ Reports, 1974, paragraph 65. Moreover, the Court affirmed that the establishment of an exclusive fishing zone was allowed only when coastal states had an exceptional dependence on fishing activities, ibid. paragraph 70. 43. For the importance of this problem see Crawford and Rothwell 1992. 44. In favour of an evolutionary interpretation of the law of the sea which permits the application of new provisions of international law, see Rothwell and Kaye 1994. 45. The requirement of an expressed declaration of an EEZ can be inferred from paragraph 2 Article 75 of UNCLOS which imposes to coastal states the duty to ‘give due publicity to . . . geographical co-­ ordinates  . . .’ of their EEZ. Similarly, under paragraph 7 of Article 76 States must ask the UNCLOS Commission for a recommendation in order to have their continental shelf extended beyond 200 miles. 46. For this view see Triggs 1987. 47. See Crawford and Rothwell 1992. 48. See: http://www.un.org/Depts/los/clcs_new/submissions_files/aus04/Aus_Recommendations_FINAL.pdf. In its 2012 Recommendation concerning France’s proposal to extend the continental shelf corresponding to its sub-­Antarctic islands, the UNCLOS Commission also took note of the opposition of some non-­ Claimant States against France’s declaration stating its intention of reserving its right to submit a proposal for the extension of the continental shelf corresponding to its claimed Antarctic territories in the future. See http://www.un.org/Depts/los/clcs_new/submissions_files/fra09/SUMREC_FRA1_19_04_2012.pdf. 49. For this view see Triggs 1987. On the extension of coastal state jurisdiction over maritime zones with the evolution of international law see the Aegean Sea Continental Self case (Greece v. Turkey), ICJ Reports, 1978, 1. 50. See the Australian 1991 Antarctic Mining Prohibition Act which prohibits mineral exploitation in Antarctica in accordance with Article 7 of the Madrid Protocol. For a comment of this act see Davis 1998. 51. See Abdel-­Motaal 2016. 52. Francioni 1996. 53. See Francioni 1996. 54. See Vigni 2006. 55. For a thorough analysis on this issue see Francioni 2000. 56. Vigni 2005. 57. For a recent discussion concerning the issue of sovereignty in Antarctica see https://theconversation.com/ in-­conversation-­on-­antarctic-­sovereignty-­full-­discussion-­28600, in Conversation on Antarctic ­sovereignty: full discussion. 58. The Intersessional Contact Group on the exercise of jurisdiction in the Antarctic Treaty area was established by the XXXV ATCM. France is the convener of the group. See Resolution 2(2012) of the XXXV ATCM. 59. See WP 37/XXXVII ATCM including the Final Report of the Intersessional Contact Group on the exercise of jurisdiction in the Antarctic Treaty Area. See also the Final Report of the XXXVII ATCM, vol. I, paragraphs 39–41.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 252

21/12/2016 10:11

Territorial claims and coastal states  253

REFERENCES Abdel-­Motaal, D. 2016. Antarctica: The Battle for the Seventh Continent. Santa Barbara, California: Praeger. Abi-­Saab, G. 2006. Le principe de l’uti possidetis: son rôle et ses limites dans le contentieux territorial international. Pages 657–71 in Kohen, M. (ed.), Promoting Justice, Human Rights and Conflict Resolution through International Law/La promotion de la justice, des droits de l’homme et du règlement des conflits par le droit international. Liber Amicorum Lucius Caflisch. Leiden: Brill. Birnie, P. 1988. Effect of Article VI of the Antarctic Treaty on scientific research. Pages 105–20 in Wolfrum, R. (ed.), Antarctic Challenge III. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot. Bush, W.M. 1982. Antarctica and International Law: A Collection of Inter-­State and National Documents. Vol. 2. New York: Oceana Publications. Caflisch, L. 1991. L’Antarctique, nouvelle frontière sans frontières? Pages 157–73 in Virally, M. (ed.), Le Droit International Au Service de La Paix, De La Justice Et Du Développement. Paris: Pedone. Casarini, M.P. 1996. Activities in Antarctica before the conclusion of the Antarctic Treaty. Pages 627–81  in  Francioni, F. and Scovazzi, T. (eds), International Law for Antarctica. 2nd edn. The Hague: Kluwer. Charney, J. 1996. The Antarctic Treaty System and customary international law. Pages 51–101 in Francioni, F. and Scovazzi, T. (eds), International Law for Antarctica. 2nd edn. The Hague: Kluwer. Clingan, T. 1993. Mar Presencial (The Presential Sea): déjà vu all over again? A response to Francisco Orrego Vicuña. Ocean Development and International Law 24: 93–97. Conforti, B. 1986. Territorial claims in Antarctica: a modern way to deal with an old problem. Symposium ‘The International Legal Regime for Antarctica’. Cornell International Law Journal 19: 249–58. Crawford, J. and Rothwell, D. 1992. Legal issues confronting Australia’s Antarctica. Australian Yearbook of International Law 13: 53–88. Davis, R. 1998. Australia in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean: exploration, exploitation and conservation. Pages 41–65 in Bateman, S. and Rothwell, D. (eds), Southern Ocean Fishing. Policy Challenges for Australia. Wollongong Paper on Maritime Policy No. 7. Wollongong: Centre for Maritime Policy, University of Wollongong. Dodds, K. 2012. The Antarctic: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Domaas, C. 2011. Critical Review for ANTA 602. Claiming Territorial Rights in the Antarctic. The Different Reasons and Causes Behind the Seven Claims, http://www.anta.canterbury.ac.nz/documents/PCAS_14/ LiteratureReviews/Domaas%20territorial%20rights.pdf. Francioni, F. 1986. Legal aspects of mineral exploitation in Antarctica. Cornell International Law Journal 19: 163–88. Francioni, F. 1987. Antarctica and the common heritage of mankind. Pages 101–36 in Francioni, F. and Scovazzi, T. (eds), International Law for Antarctica. Milan: Giuffré. Francioni, F. 1996a. A decade of development in Antarctic international law. Pages 1–13 in Francioni, F. and Scovazzi, T. (eds), International Law for Antarctica. 2nd edn. The Hague: Kluwer. Francioni, F. 1996b . Liability for damage to the Antarctic environment. Pages 581–99 in Francioni, F. and Scovazzi, T. (eds), International Law for Antarctica. 2nd edn. The Hague: Kluwer. Francioni, F. 2000. Establishment of an Antarctic Treaty Secretariat: pending legal issues. Pages 125–40 in Vidas, D. (ed.), Implementing the Environmental Protection Regime for the Antarctic. Boston: Kluwer. Guillaume, G. 1991. Le statut de L’Antarctique, réflexions sur quelques problèmes récents. Pages 171–8 in Dupuy, R.-­J. (ed.), Humanité et Droit International. Paris: Pedone. Guyer, R. 1973. The Antarctic System. Collected Courses of the Hague Academy of International Law 139: 149–226. Joyner, C.C. and De Cola, P.N. 1993. Chile’s presential sea proposal: implication for straddling stocks and the international law of fisheries. Ocean Development and International Law 24: 99–121. Lenzerini, F. and Vrdoljak, A. (eds) 2014. International Law for Common Goods. Oxford: Hart. Machowski, J. 1977. The Status of Antarctica in the light of International Law. Warsaw: Foreign Scientific Publications Department of the National Center for Scientific Publications Department of the National Center for Scientific, Technical and Economic Information. Translated for the National Science Foundation, Washington DC. McDonald, R. 1995. The common heritage of mankind. Pages 153–71 in Beyerlin, U., Bothe, M., Hofmann, R. and Petermann, E.U. (eds), Recht Zwischen Umbruch Und Bewahrung, Völkerrecht, Europarecht, Staatrecht: Festschrift Für Rudolf Bernhardt. Berlin: Springer. McDorman, T.L. 2002. The role of the commission on the Limits of the continental shelf: a technical body in a political world. The International Journal of Maritime and Coastal Law 17: 301–24. Orrego Vicuña, F. 1993. The ‘Presential Sea’: defining coastal states’ special interests in high seas fisheries and other activities. German Yearbook of International Law 35: 264–92.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 253

21/12/2016 10:11

254  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Oude Elferink A.G. and Rothwell, D. 2001. The Law of the Sea and Polar Maritime Delimitation and Jurisdiction. The Hague: Nijhoff. Ratner, S.R. 1996. Drawing a better line: uti possidetis and the borders of new states. American Journal of International Law 90: 590–624. Riffenburgh, B. (ed.) 2007. Encyclopedia of the Antarctic. New York: Routledge. Rogan-­Finnemore, M. 2005. What bioprospecting means for Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. Pages 282–328 in Leane, G.W.G. and Von Tigerstrom, B. (eds), International Law Issues in the South Pacific. London: Ashgate. Rothwell, D. 1995. A Maritime Analysis of Conflicting International Law Regimes in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. Australian Yearbook of International Law 16: 155–81. Rothwell, D. and Kaye, S. 1994. Law of the Sea and the Polar Regions. Reconsidering the Traditional Norms. Marine Policy 18: 41–58. Savini, M. 1987. Le système des Nations Unies et le régime de l’Antarctique. In The Law and the Sea: Essays in Memory of Jean Carroz. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, http://www.fao. org/docrep/s5280t/s5280t11.htm. Shaw, M.N. 1996. The heritage of states: the principle of uti possidetis juris today. British Yearbook of International Law 67: 75–154. Sullivan, W. 1957. Quest for a Continent. New York: McGraw-­Hill. Suy, E. 1992. Antarctica: common heritage of mankind? Pages 93–6 in Verhoeven, J., Sand, P. and Bruce, M. (eds), The Antarctic Environment and International Law. London: Graham and Trotman. Triggs, G. 1986. International Law and Australian Sovereignty in Antarctica. Sidney: Legal Books. Triggs, G. 1987. The Antarctic Treaty System: some jurisdictional problems. Pages 88–109 in Gillian Triggs (ed.), The Antarctic Treaty Regime: Law, Environment and Resources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vidas, D. and Østreng, W. 1996. The legitimacy of the ATS regimes: introduction. Pages 227–32 in Stokke, O.S. and Vidas, D. (eds), Governing the Antarctic: The Effectiveness and Legitimacy of the Antarctic Treaty System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vigni, P. 2001. Antarctic maritime claims: ‘frozen sovereignty’ and the law of the sea. Pages 85–104 in Oude Elferink, A.G. and Rothwell, D.R. (eds), The Law of the Sea and Polar Maritime Delimitation and Juridiction. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff. Vigni, P. 2005. The Establishment of the Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty. Italian Yearbook of International Law 13: 147–55. Vigni, P. 2006. A liability regime for Antarctica. Italian Yearbook of International Law 15: 217–42. Waldock, H. (ed.) 1963. Brierly’s Law of Nations, 6th edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Walton, D.W.H. 1987. Antarctic Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watts, A. 1992. International Law and the Antarctic Treaty System. Cambridge: Grotius. Wolfrum, R. and Orrego Vicuña, F. 1995. Possible challenges and the future development of the Antarctic Treaty System. Pages 85–102 in Jackson, A. (ed.), On the Antarctic Horizon: Proceedings of an International Symposium on the Future of the Antarctic Treaty System, Ushuaia, Argentina, 20 to 24 March 1995. Consejo Argentino par alas Relaciones Internacionales and Australian Antarctic Foundation.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 254

21/12/2016 10:11

17.  Antarctica and the United Nations Peter J. Beck

In November 2007 Ban Ki-­moon made the first-­ever visit to Antarctica by a United Nations Secretary-­General (UNSG). Despite admitting that Antarctica was ‘extraordinarily ­beautiful’, he left deeply disturbed: ‘what I found was a place that would probably be unrecognizable to the likes of Robert Scott’.1 What worried Ban most was evidence of climate change – the ice was ‘melting far faster than we think’ – supported by expert scientific advice that the entire Western Antarctic Ice Shelf was at risk. Ban’s polar travels – in 2009 he visited the Arctic – were used primarily to galvanise support for a new climate treaty in place of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. As he asserted during his Antarctic travels: ‘It is here where our work, together, comes into focus. We see Antarctica’s beauty – and the danger global warming represents, and the urgency that we do something about it.’ Inaction was unthinkable: ‘All this may be gone, and not in the distant future, unless we act, together, now.’ Ban’s trip and rhetoric, alongside media images of him walking across the ice and travelling by inflatable boat, highlighted the point that Antarctica is no longer ‘a Pole Apart’. Rather the region is recognised now as playing an integral role in global environmental systems, exerting significant impacts, both actual and potential, upon global sea levels, ocean currents, climates and weather. From this perspective, Antarctica acts as a vital environmental monitoring point regarding, say, the pace of global warming and changing long-­term pollution levels. Few major political leaders visit Antarctica, and at first sight media coverage of Ban’s visit suggested that the United Nations (UN) plays an active role in the region’s affairs. In reality, the UN performs a virtual non-­role in the region’s management, notwithstanding a determined Malaysian-­led effort conducted at the UN between 1983 and 2005 to replace the existing Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) with an alternative UN-­based regime.2 In the event, the key outcome of the UN debates was merely to reaffirm the merits and central role of the ATS. Nevertheless, the moves made at the UN in New York on the ‘Question of Antarctica’ were not without interest. In particular, they provided a new dimension to the search of the members of the ATS, the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties (ATCPs), for an external accommodation with other governments and international organisations, most notably the UN, as well as with non-­governmental organisations. Moreover, the whole episode exerted significant impacts upon the ATS, such as in terms of raising serious questions about Antarctica concerning ownership and governance; the transparency, accountability and membership of the ATS; the comprehensive environmental protection of Antarctica; and the responsible management of living marine and mineral resources as well as tourism.

THE UN’S NON-­ROLE IN ANTARCTICA AFTER 1945 Reflecting a widespread desire for international society to have a new way forward in the post-­war world, the UN proved a major outcome of the Second World War. Within this 255

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 255

21/12/2016 10:11

256  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica context one of the more surprising features of post-­1945 history was its initial failure to become involved in a meaningful manner in the affairs of a continent often identified as a suitable case for treatment by the UN. Indeed, the UN’s early years witnessed repeated calls for its involvement, partly because the lack of an agreed answer to the question ‘Who owns Antarctica?’ was generating growing friction between, say, Argentina, Britain and Chile on the one hand as well as between the Western powers and the Soviet Union on the other hand. Calls for UN action reflected also initial enthusiasm for the new international organisation, such as evidenced in December 1947 when petitions were submitted to the UN Trusteeship Council proposing the creation of polar trusteeship regimes under the aegis of the UN.3 In the event, the matter was not pursued, principally because of Cold War fears of establishing an unwelcome precedent for the more strategically sensitive Arctic and uncertainty regarding the feasibility of applying the UN Charter’s trusteeship articles (Articles 75–85) to a region lacking in population. Also during the same year, the American-­based Commission to Study the Organization of Peace ­recommended that ‘an international regime for the Antarctic continent should be established, with direct administration by the United Nations’, an approach reiterated with greater ‘urgency’ by the same body a decade later to the effect that ‘Antarctica is a continent in search of a sovereign. The United Nations ought to establish its ­sovereignty there.’4 The UN case was pressed also by a number of prominent individuals desiring international harmony in Antarctica. In February 1947 Admiral Richard Byrd used a flight over the South Pole made as part of the USA’s Operation Highjump (1946–7) to drop ‘a cardboard box containing small multi-­coloured little flags of the United Nations’ as an ‘obvious symbolism’ of ‘the ideal of brotherhood among peoples’, perhaps achieved under the umbrella of the UN.5 In 1948 Julian Huxley, UNESCO’s director-­general, urged UNESCO to organise an International Antarctic Research Institute. One year later Edward Shackleton, a British Member of Parliament (MP) and son of the famous explorer, returned to the trusteeship theme: The Antarctic . . . is being left to direct negotiation between the governments concerned. And yet there is no problem in the world which the United Nations is better suited to handle . . . The Antarctic should be administered internationally, and the United Nations should be the body to do it.6

Recalling recent debates about UN trusteeship, Shackleton dismissed as a mere ‘academic quibble’ the argument that the UN Charter applied only to people, not penguins. In the event, the demands advanced by Shackleton, among others, that ‘ultimately the Antarctic should become United Nations territory’ fell upon barren ground, since the governments actively involved there, some of which had already announced Antarctic sovereignty claims, preferred to retain direct control over events. As a result, after 1945 the UN steered clear, or rather it was steered clear, of the region’s affairs. The UN, an inter-­ governmental body operating in a world of sovereign nation-­states, was capable of doing as much, or as little, as desired by its members. Thus, the UN should be seen as ‘they’, the organisation’s most influential and powerful members, especially those represented on the UN Security Council, rather than ‘it’, an autonomous supranational actor. Nor did the situation change during the mid-­to late 1950s, when Arthur Lall,

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 256

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctica and the United Nations  257 r­ epresenting India, made two attempts to place ‘The Question of Antarctica’, a subject of ‘great importance’ to all countries, upon the General Assembly’s agenda: This subject is of great importance to the international community as a whole and not merely for certain countries . . . the United Nations should call upon all States to utilize this territory solely for peaceful purposes . . . the action proposed can only be taken by the world community as a whole.7

In the event, in November 1956 the Indian request was withdrawn allegedly because of ‘a heavy agenda and the exploration of Antarctica was still proceeding’, but also because of diplomatic pressure exerted by governments active in the region.8 However, one Antarctic territorial claimant was supportive, since in 1956 Walter Nash, the prime minister of New Zealand, proposed a trusteeship in order to make Antarctica a ‘world territory under the control of the UN’.9 In turn, the revival of the Indian proposal in 1958 was overtaken by the preparatory negotiations conducted for the Antarctic Treaty.10 Signed at Washington DC in December 1959, the treaty came into effect in 1961. In many respects, the conclusion of the Antarctic Treaty highlighted the UN’s lack of involvement in the region. This agreement, providing for its peaceful use, placed Antarctica’s governance under the control of a limited multilateral grouping of twelve governments active in Antarctica rather than under the whole international community acting through the UN. Moreover, its signatories included such influential UN members as not only the two superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union, but also Britain and France. In turn, the Antarctic Treaty merely paid lip service to the UN and its principles. For example, the preamble stressed the signatories’ desire to ‘further the purposes and principles embodied in the Charter of the United Nations’ and their belief that the peaceful use of Antarctica was ‘in the interest of all mankind’. Article III (2) advocated cooperative working relationships by ATCPs with UN agencies and other international organisations, with article X stipulating that each ATCP undertook ‘to exert appropriate efforts, consistent with the UN Charter’ to prevent non-­parties infringing the treaty. But such window dressing failed to disguise the fact that in reality the treaty, continuing, indeed formalising, the situation prevalent since 1945, assigned the UN a virtual non-­role in the affairs of some ten per cent of the world’s land surface. Significantly, the negotiating process saw a marked scaling down of the UN dimension; thus, even a relatively minor role, such as acting as the treaty depositary, was removed from the early treaty drafts. Subsequently, the ATCPs developed what became known as the ATS, an internationally agreed regime for the governance of the region south of latitude 60°S seeking to preserve Antarctica’s status as a continent for peace and science and a special conservation area, an objective redefined by the 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (Madrid Protocol)11 as ‘a natural reserve, devoted to peace and science’. In effect, ATCPs, acting through the ATS, managed the treaty area independently of the UN. Like any international agreement, the Antarctic Treaty binds only the contracting parties, and unsurprisingly over time considerable debate has occurred appertaining to its status and acceptability in international politics and law. Naturally, the ATCPs have advocated the treaty’s general validity, such as in respect of its consistency with both the UN Charter and the ‘interest of all mankind’, as well as its global relevance and utility, such as in terms of preserving Antarctica’s demilitarised status, encouraging scientific research and

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 257

21/12/2016 10:11

258  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica ­ rotecting its fragile environment. Upon this basis, the ATCPs have used, as evidenced in p 1975 by ATCM recommendation VIII-­8, the UN Charter to justify their view that The Antarctic Treaty places a special responsibility on the Contracting Parties to exert appropriate efforts, consistent with the Charter of the United Nations, to the end that no one engages in any activity in the Antarctic Treaty area contrary to the principles and purposes of the Treaty.12

From this perspective, ATCPs represented the ATS as complementing the UN’s peacekeeping role by filling the power vacuum in Antarctica, insulating the region from the ever-­escalating Cold War, and setting a significant precedent in the sphere of regional disarmament. Indeed, in 1961, when ATCPs assembled at Canberra for the first Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting (ATCM), the US embassy reported how they sought to establish a clear conception of their Antarctic responsibilities in the global context: ‘The 64 delegates from the 12 signatory countries are calling this first Meeting on the Antarctica treaty the Polar United Nations’.13 For ATCPs, therefore, the continent’s affairs should be managed only within the parameters of the ATS. In this vein, they sought to accommodate emerging problems and additional responsibilities through the pragmatic evolution of the system, such as exemplified by the adoption of the Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora (1964) consolidating Antarctica’s status as ‘a Special Conservation Area’, the 1972 Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals (CCAS),14 and the 1980 Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).15 Inevitably, ATCPs assumed a negative, even hostile, attitude towards external intervention, whether by governments or international organisations, in Antarctic questions. Thus, in 1964 the ATCPs decided against any action upon a British proposal to clarify the ATS’s relationship with international organisations for fear of reviving debate about the UN’s role in the region.16 Similarly, the 1972 ATCM opposed New Zealand’s efforts to revive the UN trusteeship proposal.17 The 1975 ATCM adopted recommendation VIII–13 reaffirming that the ATCPs, though welcoming the offer of cooperation by the UN Environment Program (UNEP), possessed ‘prime responsibility for Antarctic matters’, including environmental protection, thereby ruling out the need for any external intervention.18 By implication, treaty outsiders, lacking any appreciation of Antarctic realities, were viewed as incapable of performing any meaningful role in the region’s affairs, an approach facilitated by the fact that during the 1960s non-­signatories posed relatively few problems. In particular, India failed to repeat its previous attempts to place Antarctica upon the UN’s agenda; indeed, in 1961 an article by Ahluwalia, though reiterating India’s preference for ‘full ­internationalisation’, praised the Antarctic Treaty as a contribution to disarmament and world peace.19 In any case, the fiscal, logistical and other burdens of conducting activities in Antarctica helped to mitigate the impact of treaty outsiders upon the continent’s affairs, even if this did not prevent a small but growing number of governments from developing an Antarctic presence. In fact, emerging third-­party activity, such as upon the part of Brazil,20 prompted a discussion of the subject at the 1972 ATCM by way of preparing the way for the 1975 ATCM to adopt recommendation VIII-­8 regarding the ATCPs’ response to non-­signatories becoming active in the treaty area: It would be advisable for Governments to consult together as provided for by the Treaty and to be ready to urge or invite as appropriate the state or states concerned to accede to the Treaty,

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 258

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctica and the United Nations  259 pointing out the rights and benefits they would receive and also the responsibilities and obligations of Contracting Parties.21

In general, most outsiders becoming more active in Antarctica have acceded eventually to the treaty, such as evidenced by the example of Brazil in 1975, even if at times the intentions of some governments – for example India between 1981 and 1983 – have given ATCPs some grounds for concern. As a result, increasing participation in the ATS through outsiders acceding to the treaty and, in certain cases, advancing to ATCP status proved the other principal way in which the ATS developed during the 1960s and after. Between 1961 and 1983 sixteen states acceded to the treaty, four of which – Brazil, the Federal Republic of Germany, India and Poland – advanced subsequently to ATCP status to join the original twelve ATCPs.

OUTSIDE PRESSURE DURING THE 1970s During the 1970s the ATCPs, acting individually and collectively, continued to block any external initiative, especially any linked to the UN, perceived as challenging their sphere of influence and control. Thus they foiled the proposed involvement of the UN in Antarctic affairs through a series of environmental and resource-­based initiatives proposed by the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in 1971, UNEP in 1975, and the UN Development Program (UNDP) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) during the late 1970s.22 But neither international politics nor international law remain static. During this decade the ATCPs experienced less success in containing attempts to apply emerging politico–legal concepts centred upon the New International Economic Order (NIEO) and the common heritage principle to Antarctica. Both demands won support through the UN by the so-­called ‘Group of 77’ developing nations. Stressing that all states were equal members of the international community, the NIEO claimed that every state possessed the right to participate fully in the discussion of world problems and to share equitably in the benefits resulting therefrom. From this perspective, Antarctica, managed by what was represented as a select unaccountable grouping of states, became identified increasingly as a global problem warranting action and an UN-­centred solution.23 The previous silence of the international community regarding the Antarctic Treaty, it was argued, could not be understood as a form of acquiescence. The position was complicated by the way in which NIEO was linked closely to the common heritage concept. The resulting representation of Antarctica as a common space, or global common, possessed significant consequences for both the international acceptability of the ATS and the validity of existing sovereignty claims based upon discovery, taking possession and effective occupation. Despite remaining of debatable international acceptability, the common heritage principle had gained substance through its practical application in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty,24 the 1979 Moon Treaty,25 and most ­importantly the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).26 However, during the 1970s the ATS’s critics, though speaking a similar politico–legal language, failed to come together in a coherent and consistent campaign largely for fear that the introduction of a new issue centred upon Antarctica would complicate,

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 259

21/12/2016 10:11

260  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica even derail, the on-­going UNCLOS negotiations. For their part, the ATCPs assumed a fairly robust attitude when defending the ATS’s merits or blocking external intervention, but broader trends could not be totally ignored. For example, in September 1977 Ted Rowlands, the British Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), used his speech opening the 1977 ATCM in London to press the case for ATCPs to devote more attention to the regime’s external accommodation with the wider international community. Whether we like it or not, one of the tests of the obligation imposed on us . . . is whether the decisions we reach are acceptable to the wider world community. The test of that acceptability will largely depend on the clarity with which we are seen to be serving the long-­term interests of the Antarctic and the world community rather than short-­term illusions of national advantage.27

Moreover, he warned ATCPs that ‘The world will not give us long to see if we can pass these tests. If we fail them, the obligation to come up with answers to Antarctic problems will inevitably devolve on the wider community.’28 Brian Roberts, formerly head of Polar Regions in the FCO and an active player in the 1958–59 Antarctic Treaty negotiations, pointed also to the dangers of procrastination. In future, he claimed, ATCPs ‘will no longer be able to make effective decisions about the peaceful development of the Antarctic without steadily growing opposition’.29 Thus, a marked change of approach would be required if they were ‘to be recognised by the United Nations as responsible trustees acting on behalf of a much wider group of nations’. It is of course easy to dismiss such statements as mere rhetoric designed to appease critics, but the British government, like some other ATCPs, believed in displaying a realistic appreciation of the need not only to consider the interests of the international community but also to promote a more positive picture regarding the benefits of the existing Antarctic regime, something which hitherto had been largely unspoken and hence taken for granted. Nevertheless, ATCPs, although discussing the improved dissemination of information about ATCMs, and employing phrases such as ‘the interests of mankind’ in statements and ATCM recommendations, tended to gloss over rather than to confront the issue. In any case, the ATCPs made it clear that wider interests would have to be satisfied within the treaty framework rather than through some alternative UN-­based mechanism inspired by UNCLOS. Indeed, in 1977, that is, the year in which Rowlands and Roberts urged a change of attitude by ATCPs, a British FCO briefing paper reiterated this point: If the Antarctic were brought under the control of a world-­wide agency, possibly within the United Nations, it would be far more difficult to achieve the level of cooperation that has been possible within the Antarctic Treaty framework . . . an Antarctic authority could prove even harder to set up than a Sea-­bed Authority. An ill-­functioning international arrangement might tempt countries active in the Antarctic to act unilaterally with possible risks for the environment and with damaging effects for Antarctic scientific cooperation. The vast investments required to exploit Antarctic resources would be made in the medium term only if clear cut and stable regimes were seen to be operating.30

For the ATCPs, the interests of the international community concerning Antarctica could be met effectively only within the ATS. In any case, the common heritage principle was viewed with little enthusiasm by the ATCPs, since Antarctica, unlike the deep seabed and outer space, was already subject to a legal regime as well as sovereignty claims. In this

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 260

21/12/2016 10:11

Antarctica and the United Nations  261 manner legal arguments were employed to reinforce and help rationalise political considerations relating to the desire of the ATCPs to preserve the ATS, retain their primacy concerning the management of the continent, and articulate their strong belief in the regime’s merits and fears that any alternative regime would pose serious risks to Antarctic peace, science and the environment.

MALAYSIA AND THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE ANTARCTIC TREATY SYSTEM During the 1970s the ongoing UNCLOS negotiations served to alleviate the strength of the pressure exerted against the ATS by the critical lobby. Unsurprisingly, in December 1982 the UNCLOS signing ceremony held at Montego Bay, Jamaica, led some delegates to urge that – to quote Ghazali Shafie, the Malaysian delegate – ‘It is time now to focus our attention on another area of common interest . . . I refer to Antarctica, where immense potentialities exist for the benefit of all mankind.’31 In this manner, during 1982–83 the Malaysian government, especially Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, emerged as the leading advocate of an UNCLOS-­inspired UN-­based alternative to the ATS. Moreover, Mahathir provided something which the critical lobby had lacked hitherto, that is, leadership, strength of pressure and a clear sense of priorities and purpose. At the same time, the campaign served to give Mahathir, greater international visibility as a politician seemingly displaying an altruistic concern for global issues affecting developing nations. In fact, Mahathir’s first real move on the subject occurred a few months prior to the UNCLOS signing ceremony, since he launched his campaign on 29 September 1982 in a speech delivered to the UN General Assembly. Ranging over various topics relating to the gulf between rich and poor nations, Mahathir identified the need to protect the interests of developing nations: Henceforth all the unclaimed wealth of this earth must be regarded as the common heritage of all the nations . . . Now that we have reached agreement on the law of the sea the United Nations must convene a meeting in order to define the problem of uninhabited lands . . . It is now time that the United Nations focussed its attention on these areas, the largest of which is the continent of Antarctica.32

Despite conceding that the Antarctic Treaty possessed ‘some merit’, Mahathir dismissed the ATS as a select grouping failing to ‘reflect the true feelings of the Members of the United Nations or their just claims . . . A new international agreement is required so these historical episodes are not made into facts to substantiate claims.’ Subsequently, in March 1983 Mahathir used the Seventh Non-­Aligned Summit Meeting held at New Delhi – 99 governments were represented – to mobilise the support of the non-­aligned movement. His speech, delivered on 8 March, advocated both an alternative to the ATS and an UN study of the Antarctic question ‘so that we may have a truly universal cooperation on Antarctica under the umbrella of the United Nations similar to the Convention on the Law of the Sea. The United Nations must address itself to the issue and re-­examine the potentials for a more universal framework of international cooperation on Antarctica.’33 However, the Economic Declaration issued at the close of the Summit scaled down Mahathir’s demands – reportedly, this reflected behind-­the-­scenes lobbying by Argentina,

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 261

21/12/2016 10:11

262  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica the only ATCP represented at the Summit – urging the UN to ‘undertake a comprehensive study on Antarctica’ while noting, not critiquing, the Antarctic Treaty.34 In this manner, Antarctica emerged from the sidelines towards centre stage, even for governments, like Malaysia, which previously had taken little or no interest in the continent. Another example was Antigua and Barbuda, Malaysia’s leading supporter, which proved instrumental in raising the Antarctic issue at meetings of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) held in May and June 1983 respectively. Addressing the OECS, Lester Bird, Antigua and Barbuda’s deputy prime minister, voiced the usual complaints about the ATS’s iniquities, but introduced a new dimension, the South African apartheid issue, bound to attract widespread support within the UN, particularly from its African members. ‘What is monstrous’, Bird asserted, ‘is that South Africa is an accepted partner in these deliberations.’35 Concern about the gathering momentum of the critical campaign led the ATCPs to touch base and coordinate their views. On 29 July 1983 the Australian government, acting upon their behalf, handed a collective note to the Malaysian representative at the UN reiterating the ATS’s merits and emphasising their solidarity in opposing any UN-­centred i­nitiative: ‘the Consultative Parties to the Antarctic Treaty object unanimously to the Malaysian initiative, and to any attempt to revise or replace the Treaty’.36 In this manner, unity in support of the ATS brought together such governments as the Soviet Union and the USA or Argentina and Britain, which at the time were not enjoying the most harmonious relationship in other parts of the world. Furthermore, during September 1983 the ATCM provided an opportunity for an exchange of views about the UN campaign, and resulted in a statement in which the ‘Consultative Parties unanimously reaffirmed their commitment to the Antarctic Treaty and expressed their concern’ about Malaysian and other proposals.37 The ATCPs, some of whom were already exerting diplomatic pressure upon critics behind the scenes, attempted to reinforce their position through the addition of two more ATCPs, Brazil and India. Both were major players in the Group of 77 and the non-­aligned movement; indeed, India was chairman of the Non-­Aligned Movement. In addition, ATCPs, seeking to defuse criticism about the ATS’s closed and exclusive nature, decided to allow acceding states observer status at ATCMs and to invite the attendance of UN specialised agencies and other international and non-­governmental organisations adjudged capable of supporting and contributing to the ATS’s scientific and technical work. But Malaysia and its supporters were not deterred. In September 1983 the UN General Committee agreed to their request to place Antarctica for the first time on the agenda of the forthcoming UN General Assembly.38 A few days later the Malaysian foreign ministry utilised Malaysian television and a news conference held in Kuala Lumpur to indicate the topic’s primacy: ‘it is another major issue for us’.39 Seeking to check the trend of events, ATCPs employed the UN General Committee’s debate on the Assembly agenda to express their ‘serious reservations’ on the matter.40 Notes sent to the UNSG by Richard Woolcott, the Australian chairman of the New York Working Group of the ATCPs, spelt out the political, scientific and environmental benefits deriving from the existence and preservation of the ATS plus the dangers of any alternative regime: The Treaty serves the international community well . . . Revision or replacement of the Treaty which is now being suggested by Malaysia and Antigua and Barbuda would undermine this system of international law and order in Antarctica with very serious consequences for international peace and cooperation . . . Every effort should be made to preserve and maintain it.41

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 262

21/12/2016 15:11

Antarctica and the United Nations  263

THE ‘QUESTION OF ANTARCTICA’ AT THE UN, 1983–2005 Between 1983 and 2005 the ‘Question of Antarctica’ proved a regular UN agenda topic discussed initially upon an annual basis, then biennially, and finally triennially.42 Reflecting Antarctica’s emerging global significance, the episode showed that during the early 1980s the international community lacked an agreed view about the region’s ownership and governance. The key point at issue proved the nature and extent of the UN’s future role in Antarctic affairs, given the critics’ support for a replacement UN-­based regime and the ATCPs’ reluctance to accept anything more than a limited UN role performed within the context of the ATS. This section focuses upon Antarctica’s UN dimension, most notably upon what happened in New York at the UN General Assembly and First Committee, but during this period the key developments appertaining to Antarctica, most notably the adoption of the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty in 1991, occurred elsewhere, particularly at ATCMs and Special ATCMs, such as those held in Madrid, Viña del Mar and so on. As a result, the regular UN sessions in New York began to appear increasingly as both sterile and ritualistic. Moreover, these developments, intended by ATCPs not only to manage Antarctica more effectively but also to respond to their critics, impacted increasingly upon the course of events at New York, such as by influencing the specific focus and momentum of the critical lobby. Events in South Africa were also relevant, given the critics’ pressure to exclude the apartheid regime from the ATS. 1983–84: Taking up the ‘Question of Antarctica’ In 1983 the opening UN First Committee session on the ‘Question of Antarctica’ led the ATCPs and their critics to adopt unanimously without a vote a consensus resolution requesting the UNSG to produce a report on Antarctica to guide its 1984 session. The resulting study, informed by submissions from member states, provided the foundation for discussion in the First Committee in 1984, when the resulting polarisation of views about the ATS’s merits indicated the difficulties of maintaining a consensus approach. 1985–1993: The Breakdown of Consensus In 1985 the consensus approach broke down. During the next eight years, the annual sessions of the UN First Committee highlighted the divide between ATCPs and their critics. The latter pressed their case making strong use of arguments linked to the ongoing Antarctic minerals regime negotiations – for example, the need to involve the UN and its members – while demanding South Africa’s exclusion from the ATS. Stressing the need to maintain the present ATS-­based arrangements, ATCPs took the unusual step of refusing to participate in the votes on the resulting resolutions, which were adopted by very large majorities. Nor in future would individual ATCPs participate in First Committee ­discussions. Instead one ATCP would attend upon their behalf. During the early 1990s the critical campaign showed signs of losing momentum, especially as the reports produced by the UNSG to guide annual sessions increasingly acknowledged the ATS’s ‘positive’ qualities, particularly the way in which the 1991

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 263

21/12/2016 14:57

264  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Protocol protected the Antarctic environment and prohibited mining. Also during the early 1990s the dismantling of the apartheid regime in South Africa removed the raison d’être for the resolution demanding its exclusion from the ATS. In 1993 the critics belatedly dropped this demand. 1994–2005: The Return to Consensus The 1994 UN session, although somewhat brief, saw a major change of direction, as signalled by the return to consensus. ATCPs agreed to meet commitments undertaken at the 1992 ‘Earth Summit’ held in Rio de Janeiro, particularly providing the wider international community with information about Antarctic developments. The decision to delay placing the topic on the UN agenda until 1996 broke the sequence of annual references started in 1983. In 1996 the period between UN references was extended to three years. Between 1994 and 2002 ATCPs and their critics, informed by reports produced by the UNSG, maintained an agreed approach towards the ‘Question of Antarctica’. Resolutions were adopted without a vote that acknowledged the broader international community’s interest in the continent, but recorded the ATCPs’ willingness to allow the UN no more than a limited role in Antarctica.

2005–: PUTTING THE ‘QUESTION OF ANTARCTICA’ ON THE BACK BURNER In December 2005 members, adopting resolution 60/47 in the General Assembly without a vote, agreed that the UN would remain ‘seized’ of the Question of Antarctica, but would no longer discuss it on a regular basis.43 Nor would the UNSG be required henceforth to produce reports on Antarctica for members. One influential background factor concerned the retirement from office of Mahathir, whose visit to Antarctica in 2002 reflected his lead role in the critical campaign.

CONCLUSION Over ten years on from the passage of resolution 60/47 in December 2005, the UN still remains seized of the Question of Antarctica. Although there have been no substantive discussions at the UN for over a decade, technically the topic remains on the UN’s radar. Indeed, the Question of Antarctica could return to the UN agenda at some future date, as implied in 2005 by Hamidon, the Malaysian delegate: ‘We will seek to ensure that the United Nations remains seized of the question of Antarctica, and we stand ready to discuss this subject in future sessions of the General Assembly, if necessary.’44 However, the Question of Antarctica seems unlikely to be raised as long as ATCPs and acceding parties, working through the ATS, are seen by UN members, most notably those not parties to the Antarctic Treaty, to be satisfying what might be regarded as a set of conditions implicit in UN debates and resolutions. Hamidon made no attempt to spell out these conditions, but any reading of resolution 60/47 and its predecessors suggests they include the following points: the con-

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 264

21/12/2016 14:57

Antarctica and the United Nations  265 tinued responsible management of Antarctica by ATCPs on behalf of the broader international community; the preservation of an accountable, open and transparent Antarctic Treaty regime; the sustained prioritisation of environmental protection in managing the region, especially regarding living marine resources, minerals and tourism; the willingness of ATCPs to collaborate with non-­signatories of the Antarctic treaty wishing to get involved in Antarctic affairs or to undertake scientific research therein; the continued provision and accessibility of up-­to-­date information about Antarctica to non-­signatories of the Antarctic Treaty; and the filling of the information gap left by the demise of the UNSG’s regular reports. Of course, during the past decade the ATS has continued to evolve – the creation of an Antarctic Treaty Secretariat in 2006 proving one of the more significant developments – so that today it ticks all these boxes far more convincingly than in 2005. In particular the UNSG’s trip to Antarctica in 2007 was only made possible through the logistical support of ATCPs, most notably Chile and South Korea. Henceforth, it is in the ATCPs’ interest to continue their focus upon such aspects in order to avoid prompting demands or action to place the Question of Antarctica again on the UN’s agenda. Although the outcome of the 2005 UN session was reported to the 2006 ATCM, subsequent ATCM reports – the UN is conspicuous by its absence from their text – establish that ATCPs have basically discounted the UN as an organisation possessing a substantive interest and role in the Antarctic Treaty area.45 However, UN agencies, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), UNEP and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), have enjoyed good practical working relations with the ATS conducted under Article III(2) of the Antarctic Treaty over a long period, while being invited as experts to ATCMs, at which they contribute Information Papers and oral updates.46 Also ATCM discussions on such topics as biological prospecting and climate change, though stressing the ATCPs’ principal responsibility for Antarctica, take place in the knowledge of the UN’s interest and involvement in their broader impact, such as through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Naturally, ATCPs welcomed the outcome of the UN session in 2005. Surviving the initial Malaysian-­led campaign for an alternative Antarctic regime, the ATS emerged much stronger from the UN episode through the adoption of better management mechanisms and the creation of a much-­improved image in the broader international community. Even the Malaysian government, which once treated the ATS in a hostile manner, began to say nice things about the ATS and ATCPs, and acceded to the treaty in 2011, declaring an intention to seek Consultative Party status.47 Of course, the ATS was always bound to survive because its membership included and enjoyed the support of the UN’s most powerful members. Malaysia and its supporters were forced to realise at an early stage that the critical campaign was not going to get very far on the Question of Antarctica unless they worked within, rather than outside, the regime’s parameters. Even so, over time the UN challenge encouraged a greater sense of unity upon the part of ATCPs, but there were, of course, occasional serious tensions particularly over the South African issue. There was also a stronger appreciation of the need to continue improving the working of the ATS and public relations activities in order to remind UN members and the wider world about, say, Antarctica’s significance to global ­environmental systems. In this vein, ATCPs have sought to define and articulate more effectively the benefits of

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 265

21/12/2016 14:57

266  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica the ATS in meeting the world’s present-­day practical needs, as highlighted in April 2009 when marking the forthcoming fiftieth anniversary of the Antarctic Treaty’s signature. At the 2009 ATCM, the ATCPs, recognising the treaty’s ‘historic achievements’, decided ‘to continue and extend for the benefit of all humankind their cooperation established in the Treaty and in the Treaty system over the last fifty years’.48 Other governments were urged to adhere to a treaty continuing to prove its relevance in a changing world. As Hillary Clinton, the then US Secretary of State, observed in April 2009 when opening the ATCM, the Antarctic Treaty ‘stands as an example of how agreements created for one age can serve the world in another, and how when nations work together at their best the benefits are felt not only by their own people but by all people and by succeeding g­ enerations . . . the treaty is a blueprint for the kind of international cooperation that will be needed more and more to address the challenges of the twenty-­first century, and it is an example of smart power at its best’.49

NOTES   1.   2.   3.   4.   5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Antarctic Treaty Secretariat 2007, 4; UN News Centre 2007; UN News Centre 2008. Hemmings 2014, 62. UN 1947–48, 13. Commission to Study the Organization of Peace 1947, 22; Commission to Study the Organization of Peace 1957, 212, 216. Rose 1980, 219. Hanessian 1960, 448–9; Shackleton 1949, 380–82. UN 1956a, 1; UN 1956b, 2; UN 1958, 5. UN 1956c; Larus 1984, 53; Chaturvedi 2013, 304–13. Hanessian 1960, 450. 1 December 1959, 402 UNTS 71. 4 October 1991, 30 ILM 1461. Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting 1975, 37–8; Roberts 1978, 117. Note dated 14 July 1961, quoted, Myhre 1983, 122 note 35. 1 June 1972, 11 ILM 251. 20 May 1980, 18 ILM 841. Myhre 1983, 17–18, 171. Quigg 1983, 165; Hemmings 2012, 87–91. Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting 1975, 42–4. Ahluwalia 1961, 483. By contrast, in 1974 Jain pointed to the treaty’s ‘glaring drawbacks’ when advocating UN control over Antarctica: Jain 1974, 271, 277–8. It is difficult to say how far these studies reflected official thinking. As indicated below, India began to worry ATCPs again during the early 1980s. See also Chaturvedi 1986. See Chapter 20 in this volume. Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting 1972, 9. Beck 1986, 275–7. For example, see Shirley Amerasinghe, UN 1975, pp.13–15; Christopher Pinto, 25 July 1977, quoted Mitchell 1980, 19–21; Alvaro de Soto, 14 September 1979, quoted Mitchell 1980, 39. 27 January 1967, 610 UNTS 205. 18 December 1979, 18 ILM 1434. 10 December 1982, 1833 UNTA 397. Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting 1977, 25. Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting 1977, 25. Roberts 1978, 112, 119. Foreign and Commonwealth Office 1977, 5. UN 1982b, 81–2; UN 1982c, 12. UN 1982a, 17–20. Mahathir 1983, 7–8.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 266

21/12/2016 14:57

Antarctica and the United Nations  267 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

UN 1983a, 98. Pinto 1983, 38. Malaysian High Commission, London 1983. Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting 1983, 12–16. UN 1983b, 1; UN 1983d, 3–10. Beck 1986, 288. UN 1983b, 7. UN 1983c, 1–2. For details on each individual UN session, see Beck 2004; Beck 2006. Beck 2006, 217–27. UN 2005, 16. Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting 2006, 23, 347. Woolcott 1985, 19–20. See https://www.kln.gov.my/archive/content.php?t=4&articleId=1774912. This became effective on 31 October 2011. 48. Washington Ministerial declaration, 6 April 2009, ATCM 2009, 161–2. 49. Clinton 2009.

REFERENCES Ahluwalia, K. 1961. The Antarctic Treaty: should India become a party to it? Indian Journal of International Law 1: 473–84. Antarctic Treaty Secretariat. 2007. Newsletter, 26 November, http://www.ats.aq/devPH/newsletters/9_e.pdf. Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting. 1972. Final Report ATCM VII. Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting. 1975. Final Report ATCM VIII. Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting. 1977. Final Report ATCM IX. Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting. 1983. Final Report ATCM XII. Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting. 2006. Final Report ATCM XXIX. Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting. 2009. Final Report ATCM XXXII. Beck, P.J. 1986. The International Politics of Antarctica. London: Croom Helm. Repub. 2014: Abingdon: Routledge. Beck, P.J. 2004. Twenty Years On: the UN and the ‘Question of Antarctica’, 1983–2003. Polar Record 40: 205–12. Beck, P.J. 2006. The United Nations and Antarctica, 2005: the end of the ‘Question of Antarctica’? Polar Record 42(3): 217–27. Chaturvedi, S. 1986. India and the Antarctic treaty system: realities and prospects. India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs 42(4): 351–80. Chaturvedi, S. 2013. Rise and decline of Antarctica in Nehru’s geopolitical vision: challenges and opportunities of the 1950s. The Polar Journal 3(2): 301–15. Clinton, H. 2009. Speech at the Joint Session of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting and the Arctic Council, 6 April 2009, http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2009a/04/121314.htm. Commission to Study the Organization of Peace. 1947. Security and Disarmament under the United Nations. New York: Commission to Study the Organization of Peace. Commission to Study the Organization of Peace. 1957. Strengthening the United Nations. New York: Harpers. Foreign and Commonwealth Office. 1977. International Interests in Antarctica. London: Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Hanessian, J. 1960. The Antarctic Treaty 1959. The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 9(3): 436–80. Hemmings, A.D. 2012. Security beyond Claims. Pages 70–94 in Hemmings, A.D., Rothwell, D.R. and Scott, K.N. (eds), Antarctic Security in the Twenty-­first Century: Legal and Policy Perspectives. London: Routledge. Hemmings, A.D. 2014. Re-­justifying the Antarctic Treaty System for the 21st century: rights, expectations and global equity. Pages 55–73 in Powell, R.C. and Dodds, K. (eds), Polar Geopolitics? Knowledges, Resources and Legal Regimes. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Jain, S.C. 1974. Antarctica: geopolitics and international law. Indian Yearbook of International Affairs 17: 249–78. Larus, J. 1984. India Claims a Role in Antarctica. The Round Table 289: 45–56. Mahathir, M. 1983. Speech at Seventh Non-­Aligned Summit Meeting, 8 March. Foreign Affairs Malaysia 16(1): 7–8. Malaysian High Commission, London. 1983. Note from ATCPs to Malaysia, 29 July.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 267

21/12/2016 14:57

268  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Mitchell, B. 1980. The Politics of Antarctica. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 22(1): 12–41. Myhre, J.D. 1983. The Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings, 1961–68: a case study in negotiation, cooperation, compliance in the international system, unpubl. Ph.D. thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science. Pinto, C. 1983. Antarctica: battle for the treasures of the last frontier on earth. South December: 38–9. Quigg, P.W. 1983. A Pole Apart: The Emerging Issue of Antarctica. New York: McGraw Hill. Roberts, B. 1978. International Cooperation for Antarctic Development: the test for the Antarctic Treaty. Polar Record 19: 107–20. Rose, L. 1980. Assault on Eternity: Richard E. Byrd and the Exploration of Antarctica, 1946–47. Washington DC: Naval Institute Press. Shackleton, E. 1949. The new continent. United Nations World 1(10): 380–82. United Nations (UN). 1947–48. Resolutions Adopted by the Trusteeship Council 1947–1948, Resolution 22(11), 11 December. UN. 1956a. UNGA A/3118, 17 February. UN. 1956b. UNGA A/3118/Add.2, 16 October. UN. 1956c. UNGA XI A (4), 14 November. UN. 1958. UNGA A/3852, 15 July. UN. 1975. UNGA A/30/PV 2380, 8 October. UN. 1982a. UNGA A/37/PV 10, 29 September. UN. 1982b. UN A/CONF.62/PV 187, 7 December. UN. 1982c. UN A/CONF.62/PV 192, 9 December. UN. 1983a. UNGA A/38/132 S/15675, 7–12 March. UN. 1983b. UNGA A/38/193, 11 August. UN. 1983c. UNGA A/38/439, 19 September. UN. 1983d. UNGA A/BUR/38/M.2, 21 September. UN. 1983e. UNGA A/BUR/38/SR.2, 21 September. UN. 2005. UNGA A/C.1/60/PV23, 1 November. UN News Centre. 2007. 9 November 2007: http://www.un.org/apps/news/infocus/sgspeeches/statments_full. asp?statID=148; UN News Centre. 2008. 13 June 2008: http://www.un.org/apps/news/infocus/sgspeeches/search_full.asp?stat ID=262. Woolcott, R. 1985. The interaction between the Antarctic Treaty system and the United Nations system. Australian Foreign Affairs Record 56(1): 17–25.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 268

21/12/2016 14:57

18.  The EU and the Antarctic: strange bedfellows? Nils Vanstappen and Jan Wouters

INTRODUCTION Initially designed for economic integration, the European Union (EU or Union) has developed more and more into a full-­fledged political project over the past two decades. In addition to acquiring new internal competences in the social, cultural and political spheres, the EU has also been granted increasing external powers to defend the Union’s interests and promote its values in the world.1 For instance, the Union now has an exclusive competence to negotiate and conclude trade and investment agreements, such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)2 or treaties regarding marine biodiversity conservation. It shares external competences with its Member States with regard to the environment,3 social policy,4 transport,5 and several other domains. As a consequence, the EU has become an ever more prominent actor at the global level.6 It has inter alia become engaged in matters pertaining to the Antarctic region,7 particularly in its established capacity of Contracting Party (as the then European Economic Community, EEC) to the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).8 The aim of the present chapter is to examine the role the EU plays in the current governance system for the Antarctic region. We will identify the Union’s policies towards the Antarctic as well as its capacities, agencies and processes. The scope of this chapter is, however, limited. EU competences and policies cover a vast array of subject-­matters, several of which may – in some way or another – be relevant for Antarctic governance. Accordingly, various internal EU rules might impact upon Antarctic issues. Consider, for example, the Union’s rules on the liability of carriers of passengers, which could have an effect on Antarctic tourism,9 or the possible impact of the EU’s rules on maritime safety.10 In addition, the Union’s actions and statements, as presented by its international representatives, in non-­Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) fora, such as the International Whaling Commission (IWC)11 or the International Maritime Organization (IMO),12 might equally affect Antarctic governance.13 However, given the space that is available, this chapter will be limited to the EU’s direct rather than indirect or even hypothetical influence on Antarctic issues, that is, its positions adopted within the framework of the ATS and its policies aimed specifically at the Antarctic region. After a short description of the Union’s status as a global actor, the chapter will elaborate briefly on the reasons for EU involvement in Antarctic governance. Subsequently, the discussion will turn to the Union’s current engagement in Antarctic governance, both in general and in more specific cases (in the fields of fisheries management and research). To conclude, we will attempt to highlight some probable and possible future evolutions of the EU’s policy towards and involvement in the Antarctic region.

269

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 269

21/12/2016 10:11

270  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

THE EU AS A PRINCIPLED GLOBAL ACTOR In the Laeken Declaration of December 2001, the European Council, responsible for setting ‘the general policy direction and priorities’ of the EU,14 reflected on the role the EU should play in global affairs: ‘Does Europe not, now that is finally unified, have a leading role to play in a new world order, that of a power able both to play a stabilizing role worldwide and to point the way ahead for many countries and peoples?’ The European Council answered the question in the affirmative: ‘Europe needs to shoulder its responsibilities in the governance of globalisation.’15 These and other statements reflect the Union’s aspirations to acquire an independent (from its Member States) and leading role as a global actor.16 As a result of these aspirations, the EU has received important tools to act as a global actor, both in terms of competences and institutionally. EU primary law affirms the international legal personality of the EU.17 It equally recognises that the Union enjoys the capacity to both negotiate international agreements and participate in multilateral fora in cases where it can rely on substantive competences.18 In addition, the EU has a sophisticated machinery at its disposal for its external relations. While the European Commission still represents the EU in most external action fields,19 one major innovation of the Lisbon Treaty – in force since 1 December 2009 – has been the function of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR), supported by the European External Action Service (EEAS).20 The HR’s functions include not only external representation of the EU with regard to the Union’s common foreign and security policy,21 but equally ensuring consistency of the EU’s external actions.22 Vital parts of the EEAS are the Union Delegations, which represent the EU in third countries and at international organisations.23 In all, these permanent actors have provided the EU with strong anchoring points to engage in external relations.24 Throughout its external relations, the EU has explicitly adopted ‘the image of a value-­based international actor’.25 The EU’s mission statement for its action in global ­governance has been laid down in the TEU, specifically in Articles 3(5) and 21. These articles stipulate some substantive objectives for EU external relations, such as the external promotion of its fundamental values (rule of law, human rights, democracy, and so on), the preservation and improvement of the quality of the environment and the sustainable management of global natural resources.26 The last is especially relevant when considering the Antarctic. These provisions also set out the methodology for the promotion of these goals, which consists of multilateral cooperation, especially within the framework of the UN,27 and ‘the strict observance and development of international law’.28 Despite its clear mandate to act globally, recognition of the EU as an autonomous actor separate from its Member States by third parties has at times proven difficult. Take, for example, the great difficulties encountered by the EU when it attempted to upgrade its observer status in the UN General Assembly. This attempt met with heavy resistance from various other UN Member States.29 Indeed, third states often fear that allowing the EU a spot at the table alongside its own Member States would grant the EU (and its Member States) an uneven advantage. Nevertheless, the EU has managed to play an influential role in global governance, including in global environmental governance.30 It has, for example, played a prominent role in setting up the international climate change regime.31 Furthermore, it has recently stepped up its efforts to influence Arctic

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 270

21/12/2016 10:11

The EU and the Antarctic  271 g­ overnance, ­especially with regard to the central Arctic Ocean.32 Nevertheless – and somewhat surprisingly given its broad aspirations, particularly with regard to environmental governance – the EU has played only a minor role in the governance of Antarctica, as we will discuss below.

THE ANTARCTIC CONNECTION Some would wonder why the EU should be engaged in the governance of Antarctica at all. As (most of) its territory is situated in the northern hemisphere, at least from a geographical point of view, the EU’s involvement is indeed not self-­evident. Nevertheless, the EU could seek to participate in Antarctic governance to reinforce its claim to global environmental leadership. However, there are also other reasons for EU involvement in the Antarctic, which merit brief attention, namely, the activities of its Member States’ nationals – which are de jure also EU citizens33 – and of its Member States themselves. Although the EU is not and cannot become a contracting party to most ATS ­instruments,34 with the exception of CCAMLR, twelve EU Member States currently enjoy Consultative Party status under the Antarctic Treaty, while eight others are non-­ Consultative Treaty Parties.35 In other words, twenty out of the twenty-­eight EU Member States are a party to the Antarctic Treaty. Two EU Member States, France and the United Kingdom, retain sovereignty claims in the Antarctic region.36 In addition, Belgium was both one of the twelve original signatories of the Antarctic Treaty and one of the founding fathers of the European Coal and Steel Community, the EU’s earliest predecessor. As noted in the paragraph above, France and the United Kingdom still retain sovereignty claims to the Antarctic continent, designated respectively Terre Adélie and the British Antarctic Territory, in addition to sovereignty claims to some sub-­Antarctic islands.37 Under national French and British law, these territories are considered autonomous entities,38 and from the point of view of EU law, these territories are considered ‘overseas territories’, which means they are not governed by the EU acquis.39 Instead, the TFEU sets out a framework for adopting association agreements with these overseas countries and territories,40 which has not yet resulted in actual devotion of EU funds to the development of these territories or the adoption of association agreements with regard to the Antarctic territories specifically. An important effect of the exclusion of these territories from the EU acquis is that these claims serve as legal basis for independent action in the Antarctic by the respective claimant states. As such, France and the United Kingdom can ‘circumvent’ the EU’s exclusive competence with regard to marine biological resources conservation (see below). Furthermore, it is noteworthy that the EU has never invoked the Antarctic claims of its Member States to advance a greater role for itself in Antarctic governance, although it constantly stresses Denmark’s and Finland’s Arctic territories in the Arctic context. This could be explained by the opposition to any such move by other, non-­claimant, EU Member States, which do not recognise the French or British claims. Let us then turn to the manifold activities exercised by EU Member States and their citizens in the Antarctic region, several of which fall under EU competences – as we will demonstrate below. Some figures with regard to the three most important activities in the Antarctic region (scientific research, fisheries and tourism) might serve to give a

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 271

21/12/2016 10:11

272  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica clearer picture. Although the EU itself does not operate a research station in Antarctica,41 twenty-­two of the eighty-­two research stations in the Antarctic are operated by EU Member States.42 Three of these are jointly operated: Law-­Racovita station by Australia and Romania, Concordia station by France and Italy, and (Dirck Gerritsz Laboratory in) Rothera station by the Netherlands and the UK. Furthermore, the EU funded several research projects on the polar regions in general and Antarctica in particular. Regarding fishing interests, for the fishing season running from 1 December 2014 until 30 November 2015, three EU member states granted fishing licenses to four different fishing vessels.43 In terms of catch allowance, EU Member States caught 169,879 tonnes of fish from 2002 to 2012 constituting approximately 9.5 per cent of the total catch quota during this period.44 Finally, where it comes to tourism, 9,886 tourists from EU Member States have visited Antarctica in the 2014–2015 period on a total of 36,686 tourists.45 Comparatively, 12,308 tourists came from the United States and 4,087 tourists from Australia in the same period. In addition, out of forty-­nine tourist vessels operating in the Antarctic in the 2014–2015 season, sixteen were registered in EU Member States and eighteen were operated (wholly or partially) out of EU Member States according to statistics provided by the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators (IAATO).46

THE EUROPEAN UNION’S (LACK OF) ENGAGEMENT IN ANTARCTIC GOVERNANCE A General Lack of Engagement Both the EU’s aspirations to a global (environmental) leadership role and its connection to the Antarctic through the activities of its Member States and citizens provide a political and economic basis for EU involvement in Antarctic governance. However, at the moment, the EU remains essentially an international organisation, albeit a very special and advanced one, that cannot exercise powers – internal or external – beyond those delegated to it by its Member States. This limitation is captured by the principle of conferral, enshrined in Articles 4 and 5 TEU, which stipulate, respectively, ‘competences not conferred upon the Union in the Treaties remain with the Member States’ and ‘the limits of Union competences are governed by the principle of conferral’.47 As such, ‘legal competences matter’,48 and this chapter takes these legal competences as a starting point for the rest of the discussion. The most obvious legal basis for the EU’s contribution to Antarctic governance – and its participation in the ATS – would be its competence with regard to environmental protection.49 Indeed, protection of the environment is an objective shared by the EU and the ATS. On the side of the ATS, the environmental protection objective has been most clearly expressed in the Madrid Protocol,50 although environmental concerns have formed part of Antarctic discourses and politics for much longer. On the European side, the basic treaties confirm the Union’s dedication to ‘the sustainable development of the Earth’51 and anticipate the translation of this dedication into ‘measures at international level to deal with regional or worldwide environmental problems, and in particular combating climate change’.52 In accordance with these objectives, and specifically with regard to the field of

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 272

21/12/2016 10:11

The EU and the Antarctic  273 e­ nvironmental protection, the Union has been granted the competence ‘to cooperate with third countries and with the competent international organisations’, which can result in international agreements but ‘shall be without prejudice to Member States’ competence to negotiate in international bodies and to conclude international agreements.’53 In other words, and as signalled in Article 4(2)(e) TFEU, the EU and its Member States exercise a shared competence with regard to environmental protection, which means that the Member States’ competence is limited ‘to the extent the Union has not exercised its ­competence’, and ‘until the Union has decided to cease exercising its competence’.54 As the exact division of competences between Member States and the EU is difficult to make in external environmental matters, they have generally opted for the practice of mixed agreements and mixed representation when dealing with this field, which means that the EU and its Member States are both present in their own right in the relevant fora. Through this practice, the Union can participate in most – if not all – international environmental organisations and forums. Consequently, there is little doubt that – from an EU-­law standpoint – participation of the EU in the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings (ATCMs) or the Commission on Environmental Protection (CEP) is possible. On the other side of the spectrum, although the Antarctic Treaty and its Madrid Protocol currently do not allow for the accession of international organisations, several organisations and States have been allowed to participate in ATCMs and the CEP as observers55 or experts,56 and the EU could certainly participate under the latter category, or, alternatively, attempt to obtain separate treatment of some kind, such as an enhanced observer status.57 Even if formal participation in ATS bodies were impossible, the EU could still exercise its environmental competence with regard to Antarctica through its Member States.58 Indeed, the European Court of Justice (CJEU) has confirmed at several occasions that ‘the fact that the [Union] is not a member of an international organization does not prevent its external competence from being in fact exercised, in particular through the Member States acting jointly in the [Union]’s interest’.59 In such cases, Union positions are adopted, which determine how the Member States should negotiate. Yet, notwithstanding its aspirations to leadership in global environmental governance, the EU has in fact engaged only (very) limitedly in Antarctic governance. Apart from its membership in the CCAMLR bodies, the Union has only formally participated four times in ATS proceedings. Namely, it participated in the four special ATCMs organised to negotiate the Madrid Protocol in the early 1990s, which marked a pivotal moment in the history of Antarctic governance,60 and where a single representative of the European Commission was present. Furthermore, there was some EU involvement in the negotiation of the Liability Annex to the Madrid Protocol, as the question arose who was competent to bring an action in the framework of this Annex, the EU or its Member States. This occasion provided an example of the EU being represented through its Member States. When the internal discussion on who could bring an action was finally decided, ‘the Netherlands, on behalf of the Parties that were also members of the European Union, made a statement confirming the understanding that only a State Party might bring an action’.61 Afterwards, the EU has shown little enthusiasm to further engage in Antarctic governance: it has neither attempted to participate in other ATS meetings, nor adopted any Union positions with regard to specific Antarctic matters. Accordingly, the EU seems to follow the global tide of interest in the Antarctic, as exemplified by the European Parliament’s high interest in the Antarctica in the course of the 1980s and at the

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 273

21/12/2016 10:11

274  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica start of the 1990s when the ‘Question of Antarctica’ was a hot topic on the UN General Assembly’s agenda.62 The Union’s internal organisational structure equally reflects this lack of Antarctic ambition. Within the European Commission, the Directorate-­General for Maritime Affairs,63 which concerns itself solely with CCAMLR, has the lead. The Directorate-­ General for Environment, which one could expect to determine the Union’s positions for the other Antarctic fora, has no official dealing with Antarctic affairs. Equally, within the EEAS, which is structured according to geographical regions, there seems to be no official responsible for the Antarctic region.64 At CCAMLR meetings, an official of the Union Delegation in Australia represents the EEAS.65

CCAMLR AND THE EU’S COMMON FISHERIES POLICY Despite its general lack of Antarctic ambition, the Union (and its predecessor) has been a Contracting Party of CCAMLR from the outset, and an active participant in the CCAMLR Commission. Indeed, the European Commission participated in the Conference that would lead to this convention, thus the then European Economic Community can be considered one of the founding members of CCAMLR.66 The legal basis for the Union’s external competence with regard to fisheries has been long established.67 Furthermore, the EU Treaties confirm both the EU’s competence as to ‘the conservation of marine biological resources under the common fisheries policy’,68 and the exclusive nature of this competence, thus barring Member States from adopting rules in this respect. Nonetheless, for other fisheries-­related matters, the EU shares a competence with its Member States.69 Therefore, as the objectives of CCAMLR reach beyond mere conservation of marine biological resources, interested EU Member States can independently become Contracting Parties to CCAMLR. Moreover, since the French and British territorial claims in Antarctica and the sub-­Antarctic region are not governed by EU law, these Member States can request membership to CCAMLR on the basis of their claimed or recognised sovereignty over these territories and islands, and thus retain full competence, even with regard to the conservation of marine biological resources. On this basis, next to the European Commission, which represents the EU, seven EU Member States70 are currently Contracting Parties to CCAMLR and Members of the CCAMLR Commission, which makes this a case of mixed representation.71 Although mixed representation might be interesting from an EU point of view, as it can alleviate some internal tensions with regard to the division of competences, it often leads to confusion for third parties who encounter difficulties in determining which level to negotiate with on certain issues.72 Now and then, confusion with regard to the Union’s internal division of competences can even give rise to serious controversy. Such was the case when the European Commission notified the CCAMLR Commission of its intention to use a Portuguese vessel to engage in exploratory fisheries in the CCAMLR area. As the then European Community had an exclusive competence for fisheries, it argued that, although Portugal was not party to CCAMLR: vessels flying the flag of a Member State in all regional fisheries organisations, as well as in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), are considered to be Community vessels,

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 274

21/12/2016 10:11

The EU and the Antarctic  275 whether or not a specific provision to this effect is included in the respective Conventions [ . . . ] as a Contracting Party of CCAMLR, the European Community, and consequently all its Member States and all Community vessels, are bound by CCAMLR’s conservation and control measures, irrespective of whether those Member States are Members of CCAMLR or not.73

Consequently, the European Commission considered that it was not necessary for Portugal to join CCAMLR before engaging in exploratory fisheries, as the Portuguese vessel was already bound through EU law to abide by this convention. However, other Contracting Parties did not concur with these views, demanding Portugal become a party to the CCAMLR in its own right before engaging in fisheries activities.74 Finally, although the notification was accepted, the Portuguese vessel refrained from engaging in exploratory fisheries in Antarctic waters.75 More recently, the European Commission has challenged the standard formula of mixed representation in CCAMLR. On 23 November 2015, the European Commission brought an action against the Council of the EU before the CJEU.76 The action concerns the annulment of the decision to submit a reflection document for the creation of a marine protected area in the Weddell Sea to the CCAMLR Commission ‘on behalf of the European Union and its Member States’. The European Commission contends that this document should rather have been submitted ‘on behalf of the European Union alone’, on the basis of its exclusive competence in the matter of conservation of marine biological resources. Alternatively, it grounds the EU’s exclusive competence in article 3(2) TFEU, and more specifically, on the phrase which grants the EU exclusive competence to conclude an international agreement ‘in so far as its conclusion may affect common rules or alter their scope’. At the time of writing, it is too early to speculate on the outcome of this case. Moreover, it is unclear whether this action by the European Commission reflects a broader strategy on the part of the Commission aimed at asserting the exclusive competence for the EU for all CCAMLR matters, or whether it should be interpreted as an exception to the rule – the rule being the interpretation of CCAMLR as a ‘mixed ­agreement’, in which both the EU and its Member States are represented. If the former holds true and if this strategy is pursued successfully, this might imply important changes in the way the EU and its Member States are represented in the CCAMLR system. The EU could then possibly ensure the external representation itself (without the Member States) and could become an even more important actor within CCAMLR. Indeed, in stark contrast to its general lack of engagement in the ATS, the EU has already proven to be an active participant in the CCAMLR Commission. It has actively promoted the establishment of a ‘representative system of Marine Protected Areas’ in recent years.77 In the light of this objective, it launched a joint initiative with Australia and France, in October 2013, calling for the establishment of an East Antarctic Representative System of Marine Protected Areas (EARSMPA).78 The European Commission and its partners have continued to press this issue during later meetings of the CCAMLR Commission.79 Although there now seems to be consensus with regard to the principle of establishing a representative system of Marine Protected Areas, including in East Antarctica, some CCAMLR Members, most notably Russia and to a lesser degree China, continue to stall the establishment of such areas by raising issues and concerns.80

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 275

21/12/2016 10:11

276  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

EUROPEAN RESEARCH IN ANTARCTICA Finally, it is worthwhile to discuss briefly the EU’s research policy regarding the Antarctic because of the central role scientific research plays in the ATS. With regard to research, the Union’s competences can best be described as parallel to those of its Member States. In accordance with article 4(3) TFEU, ‘the Union shall have competence to carry out activities, in particular to define and implement programmes; however, the exercise of that competence shall not result in Member States being prevented from exercising theirs’. As such, both the EU and the Member States can develop scientific research programmes in the same field, limited only by a joint obligation for mutual coordination of their research activities to ensure consistency.81 The main objective of the Union’s research policy is the strengthening [of] its scientific and technological bases by achieving a European research area in which researchers, scientific knowledge and technology circulate freely, and encouraging it to become more competitive including in its industry, while promoting all the research activities deemed necessary by virtue of other Chapters of the Treaties.82

As the EU aims to take into account the latest scientific developments in its policy-­ making, the relevance of its research policy evidently stretches to its other fields of competence and policy-­making.83 Multiannual framework programmes, adopted by the European Parliament and the Council, form the backbone of the Union’s research policy.84 The implementation of these programmes is in the hands of the European Commission. In 2013, the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) came to a close (although several projects from this programme have extended beyond this deadline), and the new funding programme, Horizon 2020, took off in 2014. Both FP7 and Horizon 2020 have funded or are funding research projects with an Antarctic dimension, information on those is found at the CORDIS website.85 The Union’s financial support has, inter alia, contributed to ‘the leadership of the European ice-­core community’, for example through funding for the EPICA-­ project.86 In addition, the Antarctic Polar View sea ice information service is largely made possible through EU funds.87 The EU stepped up its efforts in this area, furthermore, at the start of the International Polar Year. It published a report on what had already been done regarding polar research in their FP5 and FP6 and what would be done in FP7 during the International Polar Year.88 Nevertheless, at present, there exists no explicit, coordinated Antarctic (or even polar) research policy present within these framework programmes. Attempts have been undertaken, however, to coordinate European polar research policies, both those policies from the EU and from its Member States. In this regard, two relatively recent and interconnected developments are worth noting. The first development relates to the (renewed) funding by the EU of the EU-­PolarNet project under Horizon 2020 for the period of 2015–2020.89 This project establishes a European Polar Consortium. Its main objective is exactly to coordinate European polar research, for example through the joint usage of research facilities, but also through the promotion and development of a more integrated and coordinated European polar research policy.90 One of the main partners of this research project is the European Polar Board (EPB), a collective of European national polar research institutes.91 Whereas the EPB was formerly a part of the European Science

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 276

21/12/2016 10:11

The EU and the Antarctic  277 Foundation (ESF), it is currently in the process of establishing itself as a separate legal entity. This process constitutes the second relevant development, as the EPB’s stated goal is the coordination of European polar research and the promotion of polar research projects with policy-­makers and funding-­providers.92 The significance of these two developments, which could lead to the coordination of polar research at the European level, flows from the possible ‘Europeanisation’ of scientific research originating from EU Member States.93 With the term ‘Europeanisation,’ we refer to the recognition or labelling of more research projects as ‘European,’ instead of, for example, ‘Swedish’ or ‘Belgian.’ Indeed, the perception of more research as ‘European’ could lead to greater political leverage for the EU to participate in ATS decision-­making. This follows from science being the ‘currency’ of the ATS94 – a status reflected in the requirement that to become a Consultative Party, States must conduct substantive scientific research.95 Other Antarctic actors have confirmed that conducting scientific research is essential to ensure legitimate participation within the ATS. In 2014, for example, the Australian Academy of Science warned the Australian government against constant reductions in spending on Antarctic research as ‘an internationally credible Antarctic scientific program’ was deemed ‘essential to maintain our sovereign moral claims, and our leading role in the Antarctic Treaty System’.96 In addition, it has been argued that added political legitimacy for Antarctic decision-­making might be the most important incentive for increased spending by several Asian states on Antarctic research.97 Despite these recent developments, Antarctic research from European origin is still mainly sponsored and led by EU Member States and their national polar research departments and institutes. There is indeed still a long road to go towards the ‘Europeanisation’ of Antarctic scientific research originating from the European continent.

PROSPECTS FOR THE EUROPEAN UNION IN THE ANTARCTIC: SOME REFLECTIONS In June 2015, a Member of the European Parliament questioned European Commissioner Karmenu Vella on the future intentions of the EU within the ATS.98 In addition to referring to the Council Decision on Association with Overseas Countries and Territories,99 the Commissioner responded that ‘the Commission and EU’s current focus is to ensure an active membership in’ the CCAMLR Commission, yet, ‘other avenues for participating in the Antarctic Treaty System, including a possible accession by the EU to the Antarctic Treaty, have not yet been explored’. He added, ‘the feasibility and merits of any such step would have to be assessed in the context of, inter alia, the EU’s increasing focus on international ocean governance’.100 The Commissioner’s reply reflects the current lack of ambition and interest on the part of the Union and the European Commission to further engage in the ATS. Indeed, despite being legally capable of more fully engaging in the ATS, the main barriers to further involvement seem to be political in nature.101 Not only is Antarctica low on the list of political priorities for the EU, due to its geographical distance and the issue’s limited visibility in global politics, but the EU Member States, both claimant and non-­claimant states, currently engaged in the ATS are also equally reluctant to ascribe a more prominent role to the Union, fearing this might weaken their own position.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 277

21/12/2016 10:11

278  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica In order to overcome these political barriers, the EU requires additional incentives to step up its engagement in the Antarctic. We consider three possible incentives for further Union engagement in the Antarctic. First, as the EU follows the global tide of interest, an unexpected crisis or event reinstating Antarctica as one of the central points on the global agenda (think, for example, of a major environmental disaster questioning the efficacy of the Antarctic environmental protection system, or, the renewal of plans for mineral exploitation) will undoubtedly trigger renewed efforts from the EU to claim a greater role in the ATS. Second, under unchanged circumstances, the Union might still be incentivised to engage more closely in the ATS where this might lead to increased recognition of its role as a global leader in environmental governance. Indeed, as discussed above, the EU has aspired to global leadership in environmental governance. An increased role in the ATS might support its leadership claims. In a certain sense, this is reflected in the Commissioner’s statement quoted above that further engagement in the ATS ‘would have to be assessed in the context of, inter alia, the EU’s increasing focus on international ocean governance’. The EU’s interest in this region is indeed mainly fed by its connection with global issues, such as climate change. Third, incentives for closer engagement could come from the European polar research community. As described above, two recent developments might lead to more ‘Europeanised’ polar research in the medium term, which could in turn lead to the ‘Europeanisation’ of the polar research community. Subsequently, these researchers might consider the European policy level more appropriate for dealing with Antarctic matters and start pressuring the EU to engage more actively in the ATS. As Antarctic governance is largely in the hands of researchers, they can influence the process of determining the appropriate level for dealing with Antarctic policy-­making. In this sense, the Europeanisation of Antarctic research might contribute to a further Europeanisation of Antarctic policy-­making.

NOTES   1. The main source for these competences are the two basic treaties: the Treaty on the European Union (TEU) and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). See Consolidated Versions of the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, [2010] OJ C83, [2012] OJ C326.   2. For more information, see http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/in-­focus/ttip/.   3. See below ‘A general lack of engagement’.   4. The EU actively participates in meetings of the International Labour Organization (ILO). See http:// www.ilo.org/brussels/ilo-­and-­eu/lang-­-­en/index.htm.   5. Consider, for example, the EU’s participation in the International Maritime Organization.  6. See inter alia Van Vooren, Blockmans and Wouters 2013a.   7. In the spirit of the present handbook, the Antarctic region will be defined as the political area covered by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, Seals Convention and Madrid Protocol (that is, south of 60 degrees) as well as the area covered by the CCAMLR Convention. See Antarctic Treaty (1 December 1959, 402 UNTS 71); Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Seals (1 June 1972, 1080 UNTS 175 (Seals Convention)); Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (20 May 1980, 1329 UNTS 48 (CCAMLR)); and Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (4 October 1991, 30 ILM 1455 (Madrid Protocol).  8. Ibid.   9. See Regulation (EC) 392/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council on the liability of carriers of passengers by sea in the event of accidents [2009] OJ L131/24. This regulation applies ‘to any international carriage [. . .] where: (a) the ship is flying the flag or is registered in a Member State; (b) the contract of carriage has been made in a Member State.’ (Article 2).

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 278

21/12/2016 10:11

The EU and the Antarctic  279   10. See, for example, statement made by the EU’s representation at the 2014 CCAMLR meeting: Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources 2014, [3.46]. See also Ringbom 2008.   11. The EU has observer status in the IWC. According to the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), ‘the EU and the EU Presidency played a key role in ensuring the ICJ ruling [on Japanese whaling in the Antarctic] was acknowledged and integrated into the work of the IWC.’ See IFAW 2014.   12. Although the European Commission has been a longstanding observer in the IMO, the EU itself has not (yet) acquired observer status in the IMO. See Nengye and Maes 2012.   13. On the EU’s role in international maritime organisations, see Wouters, de Jong, Marx and De Man 2009.   14. TEU, Art. 15(1).   15. European Council 2001.   16. See European Council 2010; Juncker 2014; and European Parliament 2011.   17. TEU, Article 47.   18. TFEU, Article 216–219. See generally Kuijper, Wouters, Hoffmeister, De Baere and Ramopoulos 2015.   19. TEU, Article 17(1).   20. TEU, Article 27.   21. TEU, Article 15(6) and 27(2).   22. TEU, Article 18(4).   23. TFEU, Article 221(1).   24. An additional permanent actor created by the Lisbon Treaty is the President of the European Council: see TEU, Art 15(6) in fine.   25. Van Vooren, Blockmans and Wouters 2013b, 1.   26. TEU, Art 21.2(f).   27. TEU, Art 21.1, last sentence.   28. TEU, Art 3(5). On the role of these principles in EU external relations, see inter alia Larik 2013.   29. See Wouters, Odermatt and Ramopoulos 2014.   30. Vogler and Stephan 2007.   31. Oberthür 2011.   32. See, for example, Council of the European Union 2014. Information on the EU Arctic strategy is available on the website of the European External Action Service at http://www.eeas.europa.eu/arctic_region/.   33. TFEU, Art 20.   34. Both the Antarctic Treaty and the Seals Convention are open to accession solely by States, thus excluding international organisations from becoming full members (Article XIII Antarctic Treaty and Article 12 Seals Convention), furthermore, only Parties to the Antarctic Treaty can accede to the Madrid Protocol (Article 22.2 Madrid Protocol).   35. The 12 EU Member States with Consultative Party status are Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The 8 EU members with non-­Consultative status are Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Portugal, Romania, and the Slovak Republic. Monaco, which entertains a special relationship with the EU (for example, their currency is the Euro), is also a non-­Consultative member. See http://ats.aq/devAS/ ats_parties.aspx?lang=e.  36. Another European country, Norway, also holds a sovereignty claim in Antarctica. Norway is not a Member State of the EU. However, it is a Member of the European Economic Area (EEA), which participates in the European internal market. See, in general, Fenger, Rydelski and van Stiphout 2012.   37. The term ‘sub-­Antarctic’ refers to the geographical area North of, but in close proximity to, 60° Southern Latitude. As such, these islands do not fall within the territorial scope of the Antarctic Treaty and the Madrid Protocol, but do fall within CCAMLR’s territorial scope. Sovereignty claims over these islands are generally recognised, in contrast to sovereignty claims over territory below 60° Southern Latitude. For France, these are Kerguelen and Crozet Islands, while for the United Kingdom, these are the South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands. Argentina contests British sovereignty over these islands.  38. The French Antarctic territories, les terres australes et antarctiques françaises (TAAF), are a ‘territoire d’outre-­ mer’ (see http://www.taaf.fr/), while the British Antarctic Territory (BAT) is a ‘UK Overseas Territory and is administered in London by . . . the Polar Regions Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’ (see https://www.gov.uk/government/world/organisations/ british-­antarctic-­territory).   39. See TFEU, Article 198–204 and Annex II. The explicit mention of Terre Adélie and the British Antarctic Territory in Annex II to the TFEU raises the interesting question to what extent this can be considered a recognition of these claims. Unfortunately, this chapter does not provide the right opportunity for tackling this question.   40. This framework is further elaborated through Council Decision 2013/755/EU.   41. On the possibility of an EU station as the first truly international station in Antarctica, see Hemmings 2011.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 279

21/12/2016 10:11

280  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica  42. Figures on the existing Antarctic research facilities, dating from 13 February 2014, are available in excel format at the website of Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs (COMNAP) at https://www.comnap.aq/Information/SitePages/Home.aspx. A map of European research stations in the Antarctic is available at http://www.europeanpolarboard.org/polar-­infrastructures/.   43. See https://www.ccamlr.org/en/compliance/licensed-­vessels.   44. Numbers aggregated on the basis of the CCAMLR Statistical Bulletin, Vol. 25, available at http://www. ccamlr.org/en/document/publications/ccamlr-­statistical-­bulletin-­vol-­25. No data were yet available for catches beyond the fishing season of 2011–2012.   45. See http://iaato.org/tourism-­statistics.   46. IAATO 2015.   47. See more, in particular, Article 5(1) and (2) and Article 4(1) TEU.   48. Wessel 2011, 621.  49. Other competences might, however, also serve as legal bases. Indeed, during the period when the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities was being negotiated and Antarctica was at the centre of the global debate, the then European Community’s claims to participation in the ATS were equally based on its competence regarding the common commercial policy. This is demonstrated in a resolution by the European Parliament of 1987, which ‘considers it necessary that the Commission should be allowed to take part in the minerals regime negotiations as an observer and would welcome the Community’s accession to this arrangement as well, particularly in view of the Community’s legal responsibilities in the area of international trade.’ See European Parliament 1987.   50. As captured in the first words of the Preamble: ‘Convinced of the need to enhance the protection of the Antarctic environment and dependent and associated ecosystems.’   51. TEU, Article 3(5).   52. TFEU, Article 191(1).   53. TFEU, Article 191(4).   54. TFEU, Article 2(2).   55. The status of ‘observer’ is reserved for a select group of organisations, namely the CCAMLR Commission, COMNAP, and SCAR. See ATCM Rules of Procedure, Rule 2.   56. See ATCM Rules of Procedure, Rules 39–45. These concern the participation of ‘experts’ of ‘international organizations having a scientific or technical interest in Antarctica.’   57. The EU has obtained enhanced observer/full participant status in several international organisations. See, in general, Hoffmeister and Kuijper 2006. Since 3 May 2011, the EU has also obtained (limited) enhanced observer status in the UN General Assembly. See UNGA Res 65/276 (3 May 2011) UN Doc A/ RES/65/276.   58. In principle, it would equally be possible for an EU representative to be present in the delegation of one of the Member States. However, to our knowledge, this has not happened yet.   59. Judgment in Commission v Greece, C-­45/07, EU:C:2009:81, paragraph 31 with reference to Opinion in Convention No 170 of the International Labour Organization, 2/91, EU:C:1993:106, paragraph 5. See also Judgment in Germany v Council, C-­399/12, EU:C:2014:2258.   60. As hardly needs mention, it was at this point in time that the ATS came under close scrutiny and received heavy criticism from some UN General Assembly members. See generally Beck 2004, and Beck in this volume.   61. Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting. 2005. ATCM XXVIII – CEP VIII, ATCM Final Report, p. 36, paragraph 110.   62. It started with motions from two Members of Parliament in 1984, which eventually led to the adoption of two resolutions. See European Parliament Resolution on the economic significance of Antarctica and the Antarctic Ocean, Doc. A2-­101/87, 19 October 1987, and European Parliament Resolution on the protection of the environment and wildlife in Antarctica, Doc. A2-­57/87, both published in the Official Journal of the European Communities of 19 October 1987 (C 281/190–5). By the end of 1990, the attention seems to have ebbed away.   63. More specifically, the department in charge is department (B/1) dealing with ‘International Affairs, Law of the Sea and Regional Fisheries Organisations’, which falls under the Directorate for International Affairs and Markets. See http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/maritimeaffairs_fisheries/about_us/mission_statement/ organisation-­chart_en.pdf.   64. This can be inferred from the EEAS headquarters’ organisational chart, available at http://eeas.europa.eu/background/docs/organisation_en.pdf.   65. See Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources 2014, 90.   66. See Council Decision 81/691/EEC on the conclusion of the Convention on the conservation of Antarctic marine living resources [1981] OJ L252/26.   67. See Joined Cases 3/76, 4/76 and 6/76, Cornelis Kramer and others [1976] ECR 1279, [30/33].   68. TFEU, Article 3(3).

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 280

21/12/2016 10:11

The EU and the Antarctic  281   69. TFEU, Article 4(3).  70. The following EU Member States are Members of the CCAMLR Commission: Belgium, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. See http://www.ccamlr.org/en/organisation/ members.   71. On mixed agreements in international environmental governance, see Delreux 2006.   72. Haward 2012, 220.   73. Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources 1999, [9.42] –[9.43].   74. Ibid. [9.44] – [9.48].   75. Haward 2012, 220–221.  76. Action brought on 23 November 2015 in Commission v Council, C-­626/15, Official Journal of the European Union 15.2.2016, C 59/5.  77. See the EU’s statement at the 34th CCAMLR Commission: Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources 2015, [8.114].   78. The joint statement is available at http://europa.eu/rapid/press-­release_MEMO-­13-­901_en.htm.   79. See, for example, the EU’s closing statement at the 33th CCAMLR Commission: Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources 2014, [14.1].   80. For the latest discussion on the EARSMPA initiative, see Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources 2015, [8.41] et seq. France vented its exasperation with the Russian resistance implicitly clear when it stated that ‘All CCAMLR Members except one have a shared vision of our collective responsibility as enshrined in Article II of the Convention, that is, the conservation of the marine resources of the Southern Ocean (emphasis added)’. See Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources 2015, [8.115].   81. TFEU, Article 181(1).   82. TFEU, Article 179.   83. See, for example, Article 191.3 TFEU, which stipulates that the ‘Union shall take account of available scientific and technical data’ in developing its environmental policies.   84. TFEU, Article 182.  85. CORDIS stands for Community Research and Development Information Service, and it is the ‘Commission’s primary public repository and portal to disseminate information on all EU-­funded research projects and their results in the broadest sense.’ See http://cordis.europa.eu/home_en.html.   86. European Commission 2015, 16.   87. United Kingdom 2014.   88. Vangelsten 2007 and Cardinal 2007.  89. This research project was already started under FP6. See http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/75895_ en.html. The final report of their research under FP6 can be found at http://www.esf.org/fileadmin/ Public_documents/Publications/ESF_polarV1.pdf.   90. See http://www.eu-­polarnet.eu/about-­eu-­polarnet/objectives.html.   91. Not limited to the Member States of the EU.   92. In this light, the EPB has written a report on the possible role of polar research in the Horizon 2020 research agenda. See EPB 2014.   93. In this context, Hemmings ushered that an EU research station in Antarctica would be one of the more likely scenarios for the establishment of a truly international research station. See Hemmings 2011.   94. Herr and Hall 1989.   95. Antarctic Treaty, Article IX.2.   96. Australian Academy of Science 2014.   97. Brady 2012.   98. European Parliament 2015.   99. Council Decision 2013/755/EU of 25 November 2013 on the association of the overseas countries and territories with the European Union (‘Overseas Association Decision’) [2013] OJ L344/1. 100. European Parliament 2015. 101. See Wouters, Odermatt and Ramopoulos 2013.

REFERENCES Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting. 2015. Revised Rules of Procedure for the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting. Decision (1) 2015. Thirty-­eighth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Sofia. Australian Academy of Science. 2014. Submission to the 20 Year Australian Antarctic Strategic Plan, available at https://www.science.org.au/sites/default/files/user-­content/20yearaustralianantarcticstrategicplan.pdf.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 281

21/12/2016 10:11

282  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Beck, P.J. 2004. Twenty years on: The UN and the ‘Question of Antarctica’, 1983–2003. Polar Record 40: 205–12. Brady, A.-­M. 2012. The emerging economies of Asia and Antarctica: Challenges and opportunities. Pages 103–114 in Jabour, J., Haward, M. and Press, T. (eds), Australia’s Antarctica: Proceedings of a Symposium to Mark 75 Years of the Australian Antarctic Territory. Hobart: University of Tasmania. Cardinal, D., Vangelsten, B.V. and Casale, R. (eds) 2007. Polar Environment and Climate: The Challenges. Conference Proceedings of the International Symposium Held in Brussels on 5–6 March 2007 with regard to European Research in the Context of the International Polar Year. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publication of the European Communities. Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. 1999. Report of the Eighteenth Meeting of the CCAMLR Commission. Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. 2014. Report of the Thirty Third Meeting of the CCAMLR Commission. Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. 2015. Report of the Thirty Fourth Meeting of the CCAMLR Commission. Council of the European Union. 2014. Council conclusions on developing a European Union Policy towards the Arctic Region, available at http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_Data/docs/pressdata/ EN/foraff/142554.pdf. European Commission Decision C (2015)6776 of 13 October 2015. European Council. 2001. Laeken Declaration on the Future of the European Union, available at http://europa. eu/rapid/press-­release_DOC-­01-­18_en.htm. European Council. 2010. Conclusions of the Meeting of 16 September 2010, available at https://www.consilium. europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/en/ec/116547.pdf. European Parliament. 1987. Resolution on the Economic Significance of Antarctica and the Antarctic Ocean, Doc. A2-­101/87. Official Journal of the European Communities 30: 190–6. European Parliament. 2011. Resolution on the EU as a Global Actor: Its role in Multilateral Organisations, available at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&language=EN&reference=P7-­TA-­2011–229. European Parliament. 2015. Question for written answer E–010071/15 to the Commission by Ivan Jakovčić (ALDE) (19 June) and answer by Commissioner Karmenu Vella (24 September), available at http://www.europarl.europa. eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-­//EP//TEXT+WQ+E-­2015-­010071+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN&language=nl and http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getAllAnswers.do?reference=E-­2015-­010071&language=NL. European Polar Board. 2014. Arctic and Antarctic Science for Europe: The Polar Regions in a Connected World – a challenge for Horizon 2020, available at http://www.esf.org/fileadmin/Public_documents/Publications/00_ Horizons_4pp_01.pdf Fenger, N., Rydelski, M.S. and van Stiphout, T. 2012. European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and European Economic Area (EEA). Alphen aan den Rijn: Kluwer Law International. Kuijper, P.J., Wouters, J., Hoffmeister, F., De Baere, G. and Ramopoulos, T. 2015. The Law of EU External Relations: Cases, Materials and Commentary on the EU as an International Legal Actor (2nd edn). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hemmings, A.D. 2011. Why did we get an International Space Station before an International Antarctic Station? The Polar Journal 1: 5–16. Herr, R., and Hall. R. 1989. Science as Currency and the Currency of Science. Pages 13–24 in Handmer, J. (ed.), Antarctica, Policies and Policy Development. Canberra: Australian National University Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies. Hoffmeister, F. and Kuijper, P.J. 2006. The Status of the European Union at the United Nations: Institutional Ambiguities and Political Realities. Pages 9–34 in Wouters, J., Hoffmeister, F. and Kuijper, P.J. (eds), The United Nations and the European Union. The Hague: TMC Asser Press. International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators. 2015. IAATO Overview of Antarctic Tourism: 2013–14, 2014–15 Season and Preliminary Estimates for 2015–16 Season. Information Paper 53. Thirty-­ eighth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Sofia. International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). 2014. Strong EU support brings victory for whales as IWC votes against Japan’s ‘scientific whaling’ in Antarctic, available at http://www.ifaw.org/european-­union/news/ strong-­eu-­support-­brings-­victory-­whales-­iwc-­votes-­against-­japan%E2%80%99s-­%E2%80%98scientific-­ whaling%E2%80%99-­antarcti. Juncker, J.-­C. 2014. A New Start for Europe: My Agenda for Jobs, Growth, Fairness and Democratic Change. Political Guidelines for the Next European Commission, available at http://ec.europa.eu/priorities/docs/ pg_en.pdf#page=11. Larik, J. 2013. Entrenching Global Governance: The EU’s Constitutional Objectives Caught Between a Sanguine World View and a Daunting Reality. Pages 7–23 in Van Vooren, B., Blockmans, S. and Wouters, J. (eds), The EU’s Role in Global Governance: The Legal Dimension. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oberthür, S. 2011. The European Union’s Performance in the Climate Change Regime. Journal of European Integration 33: 667–82.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 282

21/12/2016 10:11

The EU and the Antarctic  283 Nengye, L. and Maes, F. 2012. Legal constraints to the European Union’s accession to the International Maritime Organization. Journal of Maritime Law and Commerce 43: 279–91. Ringbom, H. 2008. European Union Maritime Safety Policy and International Law. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff. United Kingdom. 2014. An update on the Antarctic Polar View sea ice information service. Information Paper 91. Thirty-­seventh Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Brasilia. Vangelsten, B.V. and Cardinal D. (eds) 2007. European Research on Polar Environment and Cliamte: Results and Information from FP5 and FP6 Projects. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publication of the European Communities. Van Vooren, B., Blockmans S., and Wouters J. (eds) 2013a. The EU’s Role in Global Governance: The Legal Dimension. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Vooren, B., Blockmans, S., and Wouters, J. 2013b. The Legal Dimension of Global Governance: What Role for the European Union? An Introduction. Pages 1–6 in Van Vooren, B., Blockmans, S. and Wouters, J. (eds), The EU’s Role in Global Governance: The Legal Dimension. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vogler, J. and Stephan, H.R. 2007. The European Union in global environmental governance: Leadership in the making? International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics. 7: 389–413. Wessel, R.A. 2011. The Legal Framework for the Participation of the European Union in International Institutions. Journal of European Integration 33: 621–35. Wouters, J., de Jong, S., Marx, A. and De Man, P. 2009. Study for the Assessment of the EU’s Role in International Maritime Organisations, available at http://ghum.kuleuven.be/ggs/publications/research_reports/rr_international_maritime_organisations.pdf. Wouters, J., Odermatt, J. and Ramopoulos, T. 2013. The EU in the World of International Organizations: Diplomatic Aspirations, Legal Hurdles and Political Realities. GGS Working Paper No. 121, available at http:// ghum.kuleuven.be/ggs/publications/working_papers/new_series/wp121-­130/wp121-­ramopoulos-­odermatt-­ wouters-­1.pdf. Wouters, J., Odermatt, J. and Ramopoulos, T. 2014. The Status of the European Union at the United Nations General Assembly. Pages 209–24 in Govaere, I., Van Elsuweghe, P., Lannon, E. and Adam, S. (eds), The European Union in the World: Liber Amicorum Marc Maresceau, Leiden: Brill Publishers.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 283

21/12/2016 10:11

19.  The past in the present: Antarctica in China’s national narrative1 Anne-­Marie Brady

National narratives have an important role in state-­building and creating national identities. They also have a flow-­on effect to foreign policy. China’s predominant historical national narrative on Antarctica is one of being initially excluded and having experienced inferior status in Antarctic affairs; tropes that resonate with the wider national narrative on China’s modern history of foreign exploitation and victimisation. The logical response to such a historical narrative is Beijing’s present-­day emphasis on the ‘right to speak’ (huayu quan) on Antarctic affairs and its assertion of China’s ‘rights and interests’ (quanyi) in Antarctica. China is rapidly expanding its Antarctic capacity and assessing the opportunities it can derive from increased Antarctic engagement. In the process, as many other leading Antarctic players such as the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, and Australia have done (and continue to do); China is now incorporating Antarctica into its meta-­narrative on national identity, national interests, and the nation’s global rise as an economic and political power. As a state where the media, culture, education, and historiography are under strict control from the ruling political party, this process is relatively obvious to observe in China compared to societies with a more open political environment. The nation’s expanded Antarctic presence and scientific programme is explained to the Chinese public as being part of China’s long-­term efforts to get a share of Antarctic oil and mineral resources, which will help underwrite China’s continued economic development. China is a relatively insecure new great power both in its internal politics and in terms of the external environment it faces. So China has to be both increasingly proactive about defending its interests and ambiguous about what its actual interests are in order to delay open conflict with other potential competitors for as long as possible, hence the government’s careful information management on Antarctic affairs. This chapter explores China’s Antarctic frames and Antarctic information management which help to moderate discussion of Antarctic affairs, as a preface to a narrative history of China’s Antarctic engagement, using these as a lens to understand China’s evolving foreign policy.

HOW CHINA FRAMES ANTARCTICA China is a relative latecomer to Antarctic affairs and has some perspectives on Antarctica that are not yet mainstream; and so it needs to work to protect its present and future interests by building a positive global public opinion about its activities there. Framing theory can help us to decode this process. States utilise official frames when there is a perceived legitimacy deficit that must be addressed and as part of an ongoing process of 284

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 284

21/12/2016 14:57

The past in the present  285 legitimation of their interests. Frames provide ‘psychological weight’ to contentious issues in the public and private domain; weight that has a discernible effect on public opinion.2 The key frames of Chinese Antarctic affairs aimed at Chinese audiences are: China’s past exclusion from Antarctic science and governance; Antarctica as a ‘treasure chest’ of mineral resources; Antarctica as a global commons; Antarctica as a barometer of climate change; and Antarctica as a zone for China’s emergence as a global power. Absent are two frames promoted by many other Antarctic states and interested actors there: Antarctica as a special wilderness area of the world deserving of protection; and the negative impact of development in Antarctica. Meanwhile, the key Antarctic frames China promotes to foreign audiences are: China as a legitimate player in Antarctic affairs; and China as an Antarctic science leader. One of the main means by which the Chinese government sets ‘frames’ in the Chinese and global public sphere is through guiding what can and cannot be said in public ­(censorship) and through setting the correct political terminology to refer to contentious matters (tifa/yongyu).3 Although scientists have freedom of speech in Antarctic scientific matters, when it comes to Antarctic governance, Chinese scientists and policymakers work from a well-­defined ‘playbook’ of what can and cannot be said in public on Antarctic affairs. Social science debates in China, especially on such a sensitive matter as China’s as yet undeclared Antarctic strategy and foreign policy, are also highly managed. The boundaries are much wider than many might think, but there are definitely topics which are off limit, even in the scientific field. Antarctic affairs information management is managed as part of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government’s sophisticated information management system and must conform to the limits of political censorship in China. The CCP government puts a high value on information management and persuasion (xuanchuan yu sixiang gongzuo), regarding it as a key task of government; essential to the longevity of the CCP’s hold on power. The CCP divides information into two categories: internal (duinei) and external (duiwai), meaning that which is directed toward Chinese people and that which is directed toward foreigners in China, the Overseas Chinese, and the outside world in general.4 In order to influence governance in Antarctica, China needs its interests there to be accepted by other key actors as legitimate. China needs allies who accept Beijing’s perspective on Antarctica and who are willing to cooperate with it on at least some of its activities. Beijing also needs the support of its own people for this endeavour; perceived success in Antarctic affairs adds to the government’s legitimacy to rule and greater buy-­in and participation in the national vision for China as a polar great power.5 Thus, persuasion plays a key role in China’s Antarctic policies, helping to shape both domestic and global perceptions of China’s Antarctic interests. Modern industrial societies – including China – commonly use mass persuasion techniques to garner popular support and maintain political legitimacy.6 China seeks to enhance international perceptions of its status in Antarctic affairs because it well help in garnering the support it needs from potential allies to further its Antarctic policies, and it will ensure that global public opinion is not aligned against China’s Antarctic interests. Thus, in traditional and non-­traditional media sources there is both an internal and external Chinese language and foreign language ‘playbook’ of Antarctic affairs, depending on the audience. For example from 2008 to 2012 the Polar Research Institute of China (PRIC) displayed online detailed maps of Antarctic mineral resources on its website.7 The

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 285

21/12/2016 14:57

286  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica PRIC staff explained to me they had been put up as educational materials for China’s polar scientists. But when I published a link to the maps in my 2013 book The Emerging Politics of Antarctica the maps were quickly removed from the PRIC’s website – though very similar maps can be located elsewhere on the Chinese internet. Although Chinese polar officials and scientists have no qualms about talking about China’s interests in Antarctic minerals to the Chinese public,8 they are not yet ready to be so explicit to foreign audiences, especially not on the website of a Chinese government agency. Instead, in materials aimed at foreigners, Chinese leaders, and polar officials constantly emphasise China’s interest in Antarctic science. During Chinese President Xi Jinping’s November 2014 visit to Australia the Australian media was full of speculation about concerns for the implications of China’s expansion of its Beidou satellite navigation system to Antarctica. The Chinese government’s official newspaper aimed at foreign readers, China Daily, ignored the controversy over Beidou but reported Xi as saying that ‘scientific research in Antarctica is important work that will benefit humankind and China has contributed to peaceful use of the continent’. Xi’s comments were interpreted by Australian politicians as refuting the allegations.9 The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ website had a fuller report of the speech in English, which might have aroused more misgivings if any of the journalists following the story had looked at it. Xi Jinping was reported there as having said, ‘The Chinese side stands ready to continuously work with Australia and the international community to better understand, protect, and exploit (in Chinese liyong) the Antarctic’.10 China Daily changed these remarks to ‘The Chinese side stands ready to continuously work with Australia and the international community to better understand, protect, and explore the Antarctic.’11 The Chinese language version of the speech matches the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ translation. China Daily had deliberately changed one crucial word to make Xi’s statement more acceptable to foreign audiences. Translating the words of the CCP’s senior leader into a foreign language has always been regarded as an extremely serious matter. To deliberately mistranslate a crucial word or phrase of the senior leader is unheard of. Yet China Daily’s actions were very much in keeping with a pattern that has been followed since the Chinese government first took an interest in Antarctica. In materials aimed at foreigners, China’s Antarctic officials give a very partial account, while what is revealed to Chinese audiences is completely different. This is a longstanding practice in China’s information management practices, which mark a sharp divide between information for foreigners (duiwai xuanchuan) and materials meant for Chinese audiences (duinei xuanchuan), and is supported by the norms of China’s contemporary foreign policy, which advocate ‘hiding strengths’.12 For example in materials for foreigners China’s Antarctic science and policy leaders avoid mentioning China’s strong interest in Antarctic oil and gas resources, whereas in Chinese-­language materials it is highlighted as the main motivation for China’s ever-­increasing investment in Antarctica. The assumption of this two-­level communication is that foreigners will not be able to read Chinese, so will not know what Chinese officials and commentators are saying about Antarctica in Chinese; and mostly they are right. But by not being upfront about its interests, in other words, stating them in a public strategy document, China risks commentators relying on the rumour-­mill and interpreting China’s Antarctic behaviour through the detested ‘China threat’ frame; which only increases the legitimacy deficit for China in achieving its Antarctic agenda. China’s polar programme is heavily promoted to Chinese-­language audiences as part

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 286

21/12/2016 14:57

The past in the present  287 of ongoing political education efforts. Access to the Antarctic continent and success in achieving its strategic goals in Antarctica (and the Arctic) is directly related to the CCP government’s regime survival. Publicity on China’s Antarctic triumphs boosts the Chinese Communist government’s legitimacy and distracts the population from more pressing issues such as unemployment, social inequity, and other economic issues. All of China’s top polar scientists and officials are CCP members.13 According to the Chinese Constitution CCP policy instructions have more authority than domestic or international law in China. Hence, in addition to their scientific duties, leading Chinese Antarctic scientists are given the task of promoting their research in thousands of talks to Chinese youth. The stated aim of these talks is to teach Chinese youth to ‘love science’ and ‘love their country’.14 Chinese youth are now the primary target of the CCP’s ongoing activities to build legitimacy and public support for the government.15 China’s polar agencies put considerable effort into public education on Antarctic affairs. China’s polar bureaucrats are well aware of the need to convince the government and the Chinese public about the importance of China’s Antarctic programme, in order to attract the funding they need to sustain its recent growth.16 In recent years Chinese high school geography exams have included Antarctic general knowledge questions. One typical exam paper required students to identify the key natural resources in Antarctica, asking: ‘Which mineral does the Antarctic have in greatest quantities: a coal, b natural gas, c oil, d gold?’17 Many other governments also engage in Antarctic public education, but the frames that the Chinese authorities promote to young audiences would be anathema to most other Antarctic nations. The Chinese media are also heavily involved in this endeavour. They are tasked by the CCP government with ‘guiding public opinion’ (zhidao yulun).18 China’s polar expeditions have always been incorporated into the government’s ongoing propaganda and thought work activities. The first expedition was commemorated with a television documentary announcing, ‘Antarctica Here We Come!’ (Nanji wo laile!). The documentary’s promotional image is a map of Antarctica with the Chinese flag superimposed over it. Ever since that first expedition every Chinese Antarctic expedition has included a substantial media presence. Since 2005 there has been a big push to promote Chinese public awareness of China’s Arctic and Antarctic activities as well as that of the political issues surrounding the polar regions and the government’s strategy for dealing with them. Two CCTV (China Central Television) camera operators were part of China’s 17-­man team to conquer Antarctica’s Dome Argus in 2005 and provided live coverage of the successful expedition to conquer the peak. Dome Argus (also known as Dome A) was the last significant unexplored territory in Antarctica, requiring a two-­week traverse to get there.19 It was China’s fourth attempt to get to Dome A since 1996, and this time the team leaders were confident they were going to make it, so they brought in the media to witness the achievement.

CHINA’S NATIONAL NARRATIVE ON ANTARCTICA AS A BACKSTORY TO POLICY FORMATION In order to understand the role Antarctica plays in China’s national narrative and interpret the frames China directs at foreign and domestic audiences and their relationship to policy, it is necessary to have a good understanding of the evolution of China’s

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 287

21/12/2016 14:57

288  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica e­ngagement in Antarctica. China’s Antarctic history is not well understood, even in China. Foreign analysis usually dates China’s Antarctic interests from the early 1980s when states were debating the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resources (CRAMRA). For reasons of political and military sensitivities Chinese reports also commonly use these dates for public consumption. However, the Chinese government’s interest and Chinese scientific interest in Antarctica began well before these events. Since 2005 China has been rapidly expanding its Antarctic presence and capabilities at a rate at which no other Antarctic player can compete. This expansion is justified on the basis that China needs to have strong capabilities so it can exercise its ‘right to speak’ (huayu quan) on Antarctica affairs and in order to better establish China’s ‘rights and interests’ (quanyi) in Antarctica.20 But the official justification begs the question of when it was that China did not have the ‘right to speak’ on Antarctica and whose fault it was, if this was in fact the case. Moreover which Antarctic rights and interests may have previously been stymied that can now be accessed? The following sections will unfold a narrative of China’s Antarctica and conclude by evaluating China’s Antarctic rights and interests and the points of policy where China might want to exercise a ‘right to speak’. The Early Years through to the International Geophysical Year The excitement about polar exploration which was a feature of international public discourse from the early nineteenth century up to World War II infected China too. In the 1920s and 1930s popular books on Arctic and Antarctic discoveries were translated into Chinese, bringing the competition to be the first to conquer the poles to a wide Chinese readership.21 In the same period Chinese scientists studying in the United States and other nations engaging with polar exploration and science brought awareness of the significance of the Arctic and Antarctic back to China when they came home to teach at Chinese universities. Chinese scientists were involved in both the first and second International Polar Years (IPY) held from 1882 to 1883 and from 1932 to 1933.22 The Republic of China (ROC) signed the Spitsbergen Treaty in 1925, guaranteeing China a share of economic rights in the Svalbard Archipelago. The ROC was ousted from the Chinese Mainland in a two-­year civil war from 1947 to 1949, but retained control of the island of Taiwan and, initially, China’s UN seat. The new regime, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) led by a Chinese Communist Party government, was isolated by the international system for much of the Cold War years. This made it almost impossible for Chinese scientists to continue international research collaboration with Western counterparts. Chinese scientists were keen to be involved in the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–1958, a global scientific survey that included Antarctic research programmes. Scientists hoped to take advantage of the IGY to expand China’s scientific capabilities, and some Chinese scientists were interested in working in Antarctica. Prominent Chinese geologist and meteorologist Zhu Kezhen argued China should take part in the IGY scientific explorations in Antarctica, saying it would be the ‘last repository of oil when all other sources had been exhausted ­globally’.23 However the PRC had an extremely limited scientific budget in the 1950s and very few scientists with polar experience. The PRC’s final IGY programme did not include any Antarctic projects; and even the China-­based projects were severely curtailed due to budgetary problems.24 Political reasons were also a factor in the PRC not taking up its earlier

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 288

21/12/2016 10:11

The past in the present  289 interest in the IGY. Beijing sought assurances from the IGY organising committee that the ROC (Taiwan) would not be accepted as a participant. This was not agreed, so the CCP government decided to withdraw its application to participate in the IGY.25 The twelve states that engaged in Antarctic science during the IGY were the very same states that took part in the long series of meetings in 1958–1959 which led to the Antarctic Treaty. As China had not undertaken any Antarctic science in the IGY (or previously), it was automatically excluded from these discussions. Although the Soviet Union pushed to open the meetings to ‘all interested states’ (meaning the PRC and the Eastern Bloc ­countries); it did not force the issue. Even if the Soviet Union had forced the matter, the USA and its ten allies in these meetings would not have allowed any ‘unrecognised regimes’ – in other words the PRC – to participate.26 So in the end it was a combination of both economics and politics which led to China missing out on being an original signatory to the Antarctic Treaty. China was not a member of the United Nations, so unlike India, which also did not participate in the Antarctic Treaty negotiations but took an interest in Antarctica, Beijing was unable to raise the issue of Antarctica at the General Assembly. So during the Cold War years China was in effect denied ‘the right to speak’ at international governance meetings on Antarctica, when other countries were participating in decision-­ making and debates on it. The 1960s and 1970s – The Beginnings of Active Antarctic Engagement In 1964 China’s State Oceanic Administration (Guojia haiyangju) was established with a brief to ‘engage in Antarctic and Arctic expeditions’ (jianglai jinxing Nanji, Beiji, haiyang kaocha gongzuo).27 However, within a year and a half of this agency being set up, China was engulfed in the ten-­year tragedy of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). In this period State Oceanic Administration staff, along with other scientists and government officials in China, were swept up in political struggle for several years, then sent down to the countryside to ‘learn from the peasants’ until the mid-­1970s. So China’s own domestic turmoil, self-­imposed diplomatic isolation and the nation’s dire economic straits of the 1960s, were key factors in Beijing not following up the earlier expressions of interest in both Arctic and Antarctic science and governance. In 1971 – after twenty-­two years of voting on the issue – the UN General Assembly finally voted in favour of the PRC taking up the China seat at the UN and on the Security Council. Thus began a new era of international diplomacy for Beijing, when the PRC could become more involved in international organisations and participate in global governance, from which it had formerly been excluded. China took note of the 1975 Antarctic Consultative meeting in Oslo that began the fifteen-­year debate on the issue of the commercial exploitation of Antarctic minerals that concluded with the Madrid Protocol, but China could not attend deliberations as it was a non-­signatory to the Antarctic Treaty.28 By 1975 the PRC was gradually coming out of international isolation, but it was still held back by the political radicalism of the latter Mao years. Chairman Mao died in September 1976 and the major political and economic changes that ensued also restored China’s ability to act on existing political and scientific interest in the polar regions. In 1977 Chinese diplomats asked the United Kingdom’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office for briefings both before and after the Ninth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting held in London that year.29 A few months later People’s

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 289

21/12/2016 10:11

290  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Daily (Renmin ribao), an internal publication of the CCP, released a top-­secret report on Antarctic governance and natural resources.30 The State Oceanic Administration was getting back to work too, after the ten-­year hiatus of the Cultural Revolution years. In May 1977 the State Oceanic Administration’s CCP Party Committee set three key goals for the organisation: ‘explore China’s marine territories; go out into the oceans; and land in Antarctica’.31 At the spring 1978 meeting of the Chinese National Science Conference, senior Chinese glaciologist Xie Zichu advocated ‘seizing Antarctica’ as China’s next big scientific challenge.32 In August 1978 the China Oceanic Administration issued a report on ‘Preparations for an Antarctic Expedition’.33 The first stage of the preparations for China’s first Antarctic expedition was to gather background materials. However at the time, all that could be located were newspaper articles and a translation of a book on the geography of the polar regions written by R.N. Rudmose Brown34 (published in Chinese in 1936), which a scientist found in a Beijing second-­hand book shop. On 2 January 1978 Xinhua News Service published an open source review of Antarctic affairs, focusing on the issue of unresolved sovereignty and the conflict over resources.35 As with the classified report published in 1977, the Xinhua article was extremely scathing of the USA and USSR’s dominance in Antarctica and it highlighted the richness of Antarctica’s natural resources. Between 1977 and 1983 multiple Chinese media reports took an extremely combative approach to Antarctic affairs, criticising the two major powers for wanting to divvy up Antarctic spoils between themselves. Since the Chinese media was the ‘tongue and throat’ (houshe) of the CCP at this time, we can take such views as authoritative and representative of government policy. However, after China signed the Antarctic Treaty in 1983, Chinese news coverage began to focus on China’s own Antarctic programme and adopted a more neutral tone to Antarctic disputes. It is noticeable that at this early stage of Chinese interest in Antarctic affairs every Chinese newspaper report, much as they do in the current era, emphasised the significance of Antarctic strategic resources and the desirability of exploiting them.36 In 1978 glaciologist Xie Zichu made use of his scholarly contacts to ask for Australian help to go to Antarctica on fieldwork. As a result of this approach, in the 1979–1980 austral summer two Chinese scientists were sent to participate in Australia’s annual Antarctic expedition; though the unlucky Xie missed out on being chosen.37 In the same period, China sought advice from New Zealand on where, and how, to set up an Antarctic base. The 1980s and China’s Entry into the Antarctic Treaty System In 1980 China’s State Oceanic Administration requested places for ‘between three and five’ scientific researchers and one Chinese navigator to be accommodated on Australia’s 1981 Antarctic expedition. Chinese official sources date China’s interest in Antarctica from this year. Australian officials agreed to this additional request for help in the hope that by means of this assistance they could then influence China’s future policies on Antarctica in Australia’s favour.38 In the same year China sent two observers to the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research meeting in Queenstown, New Zealand.39 China also asked Argentina, Chile, Japan, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States to host its scientists and other personnel so they could develop Antarctic expertise. By the time it joined the Antarctic Treaty in 1983,

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 290

21/12/2016 10:11

The past in the present  291 China had thirty-­five ­scientists working in various international expedition teams on the Antarctic continent. In 1981 China set up the National Antarctic Expedition Committee (Guojia Nanji kaocha weiyuanhui) to coordinate Antarctic research nationwide and facilitate cooperation with other countries. The Office of the National Antarctic Expedition Committee (Guojia Nanji kaocha weiyuanhui bangongshi) was set up in the same year. Reflecting the strong political and strategic focus of China’s early Antarctic interests, the committee director and deputy-­directors were senior CCP officials experienced in propaganda, diplomacy, and the navy, while the ordinary committee members were representatives from the scientific community.40 However in interactions with foreign counterparts the scientific – rather than political – focus of China’s Antarctic interests was emphasised.41 China joined the Antarctic Treaty in 1983 and attended its first Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting (ATCM) in Canberra in that same year. It was this meeting that helped set in place the trope of China being excluded from Antarctic decision-­making, of not being able to access its rights, and of not having the ‘right to speak’; which is so prevalent in present-­day Chinese language discussions on Antarctica. At the Canberra ATCM, as is usual, the Chinese delegation was asked to sit with other non-­consultative parties to the Treaty at the part of the room without allocated seats, and could only watch the meeting unfold as spectators. When the ATCM went into a deliberative stage, a gavel sounded and the Chinese delegation – and other non-­consultative parties to the Treaty – was asked to ‘step out for a cup of coffee’. The then leader of the Chinese delegation, Guo Kun, now in his eighties, says he and the other members of the Chinese delegation walked out of the ATCM ‘in tears’.42 Guo has been interviewed repeatedly by the Chinese media about this pivotal experience. He says he vowed never to return to another ATCM until China had an Antarctic base and strengthened capacity which would thereby garner the country the ‘right to speak’. Guo’s painful narrative has been repeated on Chinese television multiple times and become a trope that symbolizes China’s international exclusion and lesser status in the international system in the Cold War era – despite China being a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council. As a signatory to the Treaty, the Chinese delegation was entitled to attend the meeting, but only Consultative Parties to the Treaty could then (this has since changed) remain in the meeting room when policymaking decisions were made. China did not become a Consultative Party to the Treaty until 1985. Perhaps Guo was unaware of these rules at the time; although he certainly would be aware of them by now. However this story has been repeatedly framed in the Chinese media to signify: China specifically being denied the ‘right to speak’ at an Antarctic governance meeting; and China being granted inferior status within a perceived hierarchy of Antarctic nations. The logical response to this historical narrative is Beijing’s present-­day emphasis on the ‘right to speak’ on Antarctic affairs and its assertion of China’s polar ‘rights and interests’. These two phrases appear again and again in discussions on China’s rapid expansion in Antarctic affairs in the last ten years, and more broadly, they also feature in discussions on China’s international role and evolving foreign policy. Operating in Antarctica Thanks in no small part to the help of its various international partners, China was able to begin annual expeditions to Antarctica in 1984 and set up its first Antarctic base, Great

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 291

21/12/2016 10:11

292  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Wall Station (Changcheng zhan), on King George Island in the Antarctic Peninsula in the same year. Great Wall Station is at 62°S latitude, which is outside the polar circle. When the base was set up, China did not have the capabilities to build on the Antarctic continent. In summer, the base can house up to fifty people, while in winter it can accommodate up to twenty.43 However, in recent years its scientific activities have been considerably scaled down.44 China’s first Antarctic expedition was led and coordinated by the People’s Liberation Army-­Navy (PLA-­N) Admiral Liu Huaqing. Liu Huaqing believed PLA-­N’s participation in the expedition would be useful preparation for the PLA-­N’s expansion to become a blue-­water navy.45 Two PLA-­N vessels provided transportation and crew for the 1984 expedition and base-­building project. Both boats got into mechanical difficulties during the voyage; an indicator of how far off China was in achieving the goal of becoming a blue-­water navy. Five hundred and thirty-­one personnel were sent on this first expedition, 308 of them from the navy. It was China’s largest Antarctic expedition to date. Over sixty government departments supported the project to set up the base.46 Great Wall Station was formally opened on 22 February 1985; and the head of the National Antarctic Expedition Committee made use of Chile’s air link to King George Island to join the ceremony. Great Wall Station is only 2.5 kilometres from Chile’s Frei Montalva Station – which has an air field. As so many other Antarctic states had done before them, China immediately set up a post office on its new research station, issuing stamps and postmarks indicating the mail had been sent from China’s Antarctic territory. China was made a Consultative Party to the Treaty at the next ATCM in October 1985, and was made a full member of the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research in June 1986. Having the PRC join the Antarctic Treaty was not just advantageous for Beijing; it was also regarded favourably by Treaty members because it kept China from lending its support to the anti-­Antarctic Treaty movement being led by Malaysia at the United Nations.47 In 1985 the China Oceanic Administration was granted funding to purchase its own ice-­capable vessel from Finland to launch China’s annual Antarctic expeditions. The Jidi (its name means ‘Polar’) ferried supplies for China’s Antarctic mission from 1986 to1994, until it was replaced by Xue Long, a converted cargo boat which China purchased from Ukraine. Another big breakthrough in capacity came in 1988, on China’s fifth expedition. During this expedition a group of scientists and workers were sent to survey suitable sites in East Antarctica for China’s second Antarctic base. The scientists who had worked with Australia in the early 1980s had identified the Prydz Bay region as a good location for China to establish a base, in part due to its proximity to potential oil and gas reserves. Once the site was decided on, the new base, Zhongshan Station, was built in just under a month in the 1989 austral summer. Zhongshan Station is named after the Chinese revolutionary and first president of the Republic of China, Sun Zhongshan (more commonly known by the Cantonese pronunciation of his name, Sun Yat-­sen). In summer, this base can house up to sixty personnel, while in winter it can accommodate twenty-­five.48 In the 1980s, Antarctic involvement and the international collaborations that stemmed from activities there greatly increased China’s international partnerships and global status. However, 1989 was a turning point in terms of Chinese domestic and foreign policy. After the violent crackdown on the pro-­democracy movement in June 1989, international public opinion turned against the Chinese government. In response, CCP senior leader Deng

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 292

21/12/2016 10:11

The past in the present  293 Xiaoping advocated a new foreign policy strategy of ‘hiding our strength, biding our time; doing what we can’ (taoguang, yanghui, you suo zuowei) to deal with Western criticism and to prevent conflict with Western countries. As a consequence, that year, China’s Antarctic strategy adjusted to a consolidating phase. Meanwhile the establishment of a new polar organisation in Shanghai in October 1989, the PRIC (Zhongguo jidi yanjiusuo),49 was the first public indication that China had aspirations beyond Antarctica. Between 1989 and 2004, China shifted its priorities in the Antarctic from base construction to building a meaningful polar scientific research programme and exploring Antarctic resource potential. As early as 1990, China Oceanic Administration vessel ‘Ocean 4’ was sent down to Antarctic waters to investigate deep seabed mineral resources from the Antarctic to the Indian Ocean.50 Chinese science in Antarctica gradually became more ambitious too. In 1996 Chinese scientists began the first of four attempts to reach Dome A.51 In 1998 Chinese scientists launched their first expedition to the previously unexplored Grove Mountains, an area rich in meteorites. As a result of exploration there, China soon became the country with the third largest collection of Antarctic meteorites. China’s ‘Great Leap’ in Antarctica Chinese polar specialists divide China’s Antarctic activities into four stages: 1980–1984: deliberations and preparations; 1984–1990: setting up bases and sending expeditions; 1991–2004: a focus on basic science; and 2005 to the present: described as ‘great leap’-­ style development.52 This new great leap into Antarctica began dramatically, when Chinese expeditions entered the ranks of significant Antarctic exploration, discovery, and leadership. The first breakthrough in the new era of China’s Antarctic activity was carefully scripted and broadcast live to domestic and international audiences; a feat that earlier Antarctic explorers could only have imagined. According to China Daily at precisely 3:16 a.m. (Beijing time) on 18 January 2005, the Chinese team finally reached the peak of Dome A and planted an enormous Chinese flag to mark that they had conquered the spot for China.53 As noted, the arduous journey to Dome A was filmed in real time by a Chinese camera crew, a far cry from the lonely exploits of Antarctica’s Heroic Era explorers, such as Amundsen or Scott. During the same expedition another Chinese scientific team spent 130 days exploring the Grove Mountains. Like other explorers before them, the Chinese scientists marked their presence by naming the various points of geological significance they discovered, with names rich in cultural meaning such as Gui Shan (Turtle Mountain), She Shan (Snake Mountain), and Xi Hu (Western Lake).54 China’s Antarctic personnel were following well-­established symbolic acts that help to mark out sovereignty in an unclaimed territory, just as many other generations of Antarctic explorers have done before them on behalf of their respective countries.55 China has had names for 295 sites in Antarctica acknowledged by the international community. This makes it a middle player with regard to naming rights, ahead of France at 232, but behind Japan at 343, and well behind the USA which has had 13,192 of its suggested names for Antarctic geographic features officially recognised. Also in 2005, Zhang Zhanhai, formerly the director of PRIC, was elected to a ­two-­year term as vice president of the Scientific Commission on Antarctic Research (SCAR), an

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 293

21/12/2016 10:11

294  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica important ‘eyes and ears’ role and a first for China.56 Also, 2005 was the year when two China-­based scholars, Li Shenggui and Pan Min, urged Chinese social scientists to pay greater attention to researching Antarctic issues. They stated that up until this point China had focused its attention on the ‘hard’ sciences while neglecting the important role of social scientists in exploring and articulating China’s Antarctic agenda. The authors asserted that this ‘neglect has been restricting China’s voice, rights and interests’ in international Antarctic affairs and influencing the country’s international status, making it too passive.57 Following the authors’ rallying cry, there was a steady increase in Chinese social science publishing on Antarctica, compared with the output of previous years. This new emphasis was directly encouraged by senior government leaders.58 China’s ‘great leap’ in Antarctic affairs has been all the more noticeable in terms of capacity-­building. China’s future economic development is measured in five-­year plans, and its Antarctic agenda is no different. In the Eleventh Five-­Year Plan, from 2006 to 2010, China refurbished the Zhongshan and Great Wall Stations; set up a new summer-­ only research base at Dome A, known as Kunlun Station; refitted the ice breaker Xue Long; established a dedicated berth for Xue Long and polar equipment warehouse space in Shanghai; increased the budget for polar research three-­fold; stepped up domestic and international promotion of China’s polar programme; and became increasingly ­outspoken on Antarctic governance issues. China’s third Antarctic base, Kunlun Station on Dome A, was officially opened in February 2009. Kunlun is a real place in China, but it also has mythical associations deeply rooted in Chinese culture. According to tradition, Kunlun Mountain is a Daoist paradise, a place where communication between humans and gods is possible. Kunlun Station has a floor space of 500 square metres and it can accommodate between 15 and 20 personnel. From the point of view of status and political significance, having a base at Dome A is equivalent to the US occupying the Terrestrial South Pole and Russia occupying the South Magnetic Pole, and this was certainly one of the factors involved in China’s decision to invest in Kunlun Station.59 Dome A is the highest point on the Antarctic ice sheet, and could well be the coldest place on the Earth’s surface. In keeping with the tendencies of ‘great leap’ rhetoric, in this new era China’s polar officials began talking up China’s Antarctic capabilities saying that they would enable China to jump ahead of the capacity of other major Antarctic players. In 2006 Chen Lianzeng, vice administrator of the State Oceanic Administration, boasted that China’s Antarctic programme would soon be on a par with developed countries.60 At the time it seemed an ambitious goal, but Chen’s prediction had in fact come true by the end of the following five-­year plan. A publication commemorating twenty years of polar research in China noted that Chinese polar specialists were becoming more active in global governance on Antarctic and Arctic issues. Between 2005 and 2009 China had two people serving as vice presidents of SCAR, ten scientists on SCAR committees, and a total of twenty-­four leadership roles in polar governing bodies such as SCAR, Asian Forum for Polar Science (AFoPS), and the 2008–2009 International Polar Year (IPY).61 This was a marked change from China’s more passive behaviour in Antarctic governance in the past, and reflected an adjustment in Chinese foreign policy. Beginning in 1999, after NATO’s intervention in the war over Kosovo, which included the USA accidentally (or according to Chinese sources, ­deliberately) bombing one of the buildings of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Chinese

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 294

21/12/2016 10:11

The past in the present  295 foreign policy moved to an ‘active defensive position’.62 This meant that China became more proactive in both political and economic affairs in order to combat perceived strong attacks from the West on both fronts. In the early 2000s, as China’s economic and political power grew, Chinese scholars debated the relevance of Deng Xiaoping’s foreign policy maxim advocating China to ‘hide its strengths and bide its time’. By 2008 the Chinese foreign policy line was adjusted to focus on the more proactive ‘do what we can’ (you suo zuo wei) aspect of Deng’s foreign policy rule.63 From 2008 the global economic crisis gave further impetus to China’s increased activities in Antarctica because other leading players had to cut back on Antarctic budgets. The US had an 8 per cent cut in polar spending from 2012; while other previously strong players in Antarctic affairs such as Russia, Australia, and the United Kingdom had their budgets frozen for the first three years after 2008, with subsequent budget increases barely matching inflation. In the most recent Five-­Year Plan (2011–2015) China continued its dramatic expansion of Antarctic capabilities and engagement; greatly increasing budgets, expanding programmes, and extending China’s Antarctic presence. China set up a fourth Antarctic research station – Taishan, named after a culturally significant mountain in China – during this five-­year plan and announced plans to set up a fifth in Victoria Land. Taishan Station was constructed over a period of forty-­five days by a twenty-­eight-­member team in the 2013–2014 season. It is a summer-­only station, located on the East Antarctic ice sheet about 520 kilometres from Zhongshan Station, 715 kilometres from Kunlun Station and 85 kilometres from China’s campsites located in the Grove Mountains. The station has a total area of 1,000 square metres, and can house a maximum of twenty staff. China’s Thirteenth Five-­Year Plan China’s current Five-­Year Plan (2016–2020) is slightly off schedule, due to budget restraints and other problems. During the 2015–2016 austral summer China launched its intercontinental aeroplane network in Antarctica to transport its Antarctic scientists and it increased its polar science budget significantly. But in 2016 at the Santiago ATCM, Chinese polar officials quietly revealed that the location for China’s as-­yet-­unnamed fifth Antarctic research station has now been changed, due to concerns about the harsh environment of the original site and budget issues. The new location has not yet been announced, but it will still be in the strategically-­important Ross Sea region, where the USA, New Zealand, Korea, Germany, and France also have research stations. The plans for China’s new research station show a striking star-­shaped building of around 5,500 square metres, which will make it China’s largest Antarctic base. It will be 1,000 square metres bigger than Korea’s new base, Jang Bogo, but considerably smaller than the USA’s nearby McMurdo Station which can house up to 1,500 personnel with 85 different buildings. China’s newest base will accommodate up to 80 people in the summer and 30 during the winter. By 2018 China will also launch its state-­of-­the-­art new polar research vessel. China’s new enhanced Antarctic transport capacity means it now has (as China’s State Oceanic Administration boasts, using military strategic language) ‘fully self-­sufficient land, sea, and air capabilities at the poles’.64 China’s expanding presence and engagement in Antarctica in recent decades reflects the progress of China’s modern economic development and ever-­increasing engagement in global economic and political affairs. Beijing is now moving from a defensive to a

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 295

21/12/2016 10:11

296  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica more proactive approach in its overall foreign policy. Its expanded activities in Antarctica and stated desire for more ‘status and influence’ to defend ‘polar rights’ reflect this. In October 2014 at a two-­day work forum on Chinese diplomacy on periphery areas,65 Chinese President and CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping used a phrase ‘fenfa youwei’ or ‘be proactive’, which quickly became the new tifa (politically correct term) that summed up the foreign policy of his government. Xi’s subsequent speeches on foreign affairs have further cemented this new policy direction.66 China is taking on a more active and ambitious foreign policy approach and we can expect this to have a knock-­on effect on China’s behaviour in Antarctica.

CHINA’S ANTARCTIC RIGHTS AND INTERESTS China’s polar leaders and commentators have repeatedly emphasised that China’s rapidly expanding Antarctic capacities, from 2005 onwards, are towards the goal of protecting China’s Antarctic ‘rights and interests’ and ‘right to speak’ on Antarctic affairs. So what exactly are China’s Antarctic rights, what are its interests, and on what areas might it want to speak up differently on Antarctic affairs from other Antarctic states? China’s rights in Antarctica (along with other non-­claimant Antarctic states) are as follows: ●

rights to engage in Antarctic science; rights to set up new scientific bases in Antarctica; ●● rights to inspect other nation’s Antarctic bases; ●● rights to access other Antarctic states’ science data; ●● rights to participate in Antarctic governance under existing norms and agreements; ●● rights to participate in Antarctic Treaty committees and working groups; ●● rights to participate in setting any new norms in Antarctic governance; ●● rights to fish in Antarctic waters; ●● rights to access Antarctic freshwater; ●● rights to engage in bioprospecting in Antarctica; ●● rights to send tourists to Antarctica; ●● rights to jurisdiction over its own citizens in Antarctica; ●● rights to use Antarctic seas and airspace for peaceful activities; ● right to speak up on Antarctic affairs. ●●

China’s interests in Antarctica are to exercise all the above existing rights and protect access to any potential rights in Antarctic affairs. So what is China’s position on current and future governance challenges in Antarctica? ●

China’s view on access to, and quotas for, fishing; tourism; bioprospecting: take up rights before they are taken away. ●● China’s view on environmental protection: ‘soft presence’ (ruan cunzai) (in other words, a gambit to control territory). ●● China’s view on Antarctic mineral resource exploitation: ‘matter of time’. ● China’s view on Antarctic sovereignty: res nullius (bu shuyu renhe guojia).

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 296

21/12/2016 10:11

The past in the present  297 In a relatively short space of time, China has gone from being an outsider in Antarctic governance to becoming one of the leading players in Antarctic affairs. China’s dramatic rise in Antarctic affairs has been carefully planned and expanded in parallel with the development of the Chinese economy. China’s frames on some of the new challenges facing Antarctic governance are not the mainstream view and this is a problem for the states within Antarctica who seek to preserve the Antarctic continent and Southern Ocean as a unique wilderness environment, because all Antarctic decision-­ making requires consensus.

CONCLUSION A new era is dawning in Chinese foreign policy, as China’s economic growth enables it to move from past timorousness in declaring itself a global leader and with a relative inability to defend its interests, to one where Beijing can seek adjustments in the geopolitical environment it has faced for the last sixty years. In the Chinese language media politicians are increasingly talking of China as a great power. China’s upgrade in Antarctic capacity reflects this new confidence and proactivity. China’s Antarctic national narrative provides a useful lens to understand more broader questions of Chinese foreign policy intentions, particularly on the question of whether or not Beijing is a ‘reluctant stakeholder’ in the international system. Below I have summarised what China’s Antarctic behaviour reveals about China’s evolving foreign policy ● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

China’s leaders are determined to restore their nation’s international status, they look for activities which demonstrate that status. China is a rising power, and seeks vehicles to demonstrate that power. China is seeking leadership roles, and influence, but is not yet willing to openly challenge the current major players. Access to resources is a major driver of China’s foreign policy. Where China can’t affect change, it makes the best out of the current order and quietly pursues its own interests. Where there is a possibility of bringing about new norms and a new order, China acts assertively. China forges United Fronts with sometimes unlikely partners to achieve particular goals. There is a frequent disjuncture between China’s internal debates and official behaviour. Internationally, China has a preference for action, rather than talk.

NOTES   1. This chapter forms part of a larger research project on ‘China’s polar strategy and global governance’. I am grateful to the Wilson Center and the Gerda Henkel Foundation for funding to support this research.   2. Snow and Benford 1992, 137.   3. For more on China’s modernised censorship and information management see Brady 2008.   4. Brady 2008, 28.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 297

21/12/2016 10:11

298  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica   5.   6.   7.   8.   9.

Brady 2017. Brady 2009. http;//tech.sina.com.cn/d/2008-­07-­14/13262324769.shtml. Discussed in more detail in Brady 2013. Journalist interview with Australia’s Minister for Environment, Greg Hunt, 21 January 2015, http://www. environment.gov.au/minister/hunt/2015/tr20150121.html. 10. ‘Xi Jinping visits Chinese and Australian Antarctic scientific researchers and inspects Chinese research vessel Xue Long’, http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/topics_665678/xjpzxcxesgjtldrdjcfhdadlyxxlfjjxgsfwbttpyjjdgldrhw/t1212943.shtml. 11. China Daily 2014. 12. Since 1989 Chinese foreign policy has been guided by Deng Xiaoping’s advice that China should ‘hide its strengths and bide its time’ (taoguang yanghui). 13. Zhongxin lingdao (PRIC leadership) http://www.pric.org.cn/detail/sub.aspx?c=9. 14. State Bureau of Survey and Mapping, Zhongguo Nanji cehui kexue kaocha 22 nian chengjiu yu gongxian [22 years of achievements of China’s Antarctic mapping], 2007, http://www.sbsm.gov.cn/article/ztzl/jdch/ jdch/200711/20071100027867.shtml. 15. See Xuanchuan wenhua zhengce fagui bianweihui, ed., Xuanchuan Wenhua Zhengce Fagui [Policies and regulations on propaganda and culture] (Kunming: Yunnan renmin chubanshe, 1999), 10. 16. Interview of Dr Huigen Yang, Director of PRIC and Leader of Chinare, http://www.sciencepoles. org/ articles/article_detail/interview_of_dr_huigen_yang_director_of_the_polar_research_institute_of_ chi/. 17. ‘Jidi diqu’ (Polar regions), http://www.doc88.com/p-­854247175909.html (accessed 7 November 2014). 18. See Brady 2008, 79. 19. China Daily 2005. 20. ‘Wo guo xinjin jidi kexue kaocha pobingchuan lizheng 2013 nian touru shiyong’ [Our new polar expedition icebreaker should be ready by 2013] http://news.xinhuanet.com/tech/2011-­06/22/c_121566754.htm. 21. ‘Bingwan A’ (Dome A), http://www.cast.org.cn/n35081/n12101561/12103482_3.html. 22. Wang and Zhang 2010, 143. 23. Liu Xiaohan, Zhongguo qiangzhan Nanji zui gaodian ling Meiguo shiliao weiji [China’s seizing the highest point in Antarctica has made the USA anxious], August 22, 2008, http://news.sohu.com/20090108/ n261650601.shtml. 24. See the list of China’s final IGY programme in Wang and Zhang 2010, 149. 25. Lee Wei-­chin 1990, 580 and Wang and Zhang 2010, 151. 26. Belanger, 2006, 38 and 373. 27. ‘Bingwan A’ (Dome A), http://www.cast.org.cn/n35081/n12101561/12103482_3.html. 28. Renmin ribao guoji bu ziliao zu, Shijie ‘zuihou de bianjiang’ – Nanjizhou de ziyuan zhengduo zhan [The world’s ‘Last Frontier’ – The fight for control over Antarctic resources], Neibu ziliao 158 (1977). 29. External Intelligence Bureau 1979. 30. Renmin ribao guoji bu ziliao zu, Shijie ‘zuihou de bianjiang’ – Nanjizhou de ziyuan zhengduo zhan [The world’s ‘Last Frontier’ – The fight for control over Antarctic resources], Neibu ziliao 158 (1977), 2. 31. Wu Heng, http://www.baike.com/wiki/%E6%AD%A6%E8%A1%A1. 32. Xie Zichu, http://baike.baidu.com/view/1563069.htm?tp=0_00. 33. Zhongguo tingjin Nanji, Nanji tiaoyue fuyi [China advances in the Antarctic, reviews the Antarctic Treaty], http://www.ocean360.net/?action-­viewnews-­itemid-­107-­page-­2. 34. Rudmose Brown 1927. 35. ‘US, USSR compete for Antarctic dominance,’ OW041041Y Peking NCNA Domestic Service in Chinese, 0754 GMT 2 January 1978, Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). 36. My comments are based on a database survey of Chinese language news media sources collected in FBIS from 1974 to 1985. 37. Xie Zichu: http://baike.baidu.com/view/1563069.htm?tp=0_00. 38. Peter Forsythe, China: Interests in Antarctica, CAYP CH805,2802, Box 1296, Antarctic Division General, National Archives, Christchurch, New Zealand. 39. Ibid. 40. See Guojia Nanji kaocha weyuanhui [National Antarctic Expedition Committee], http://bit.ly/1n7GFFT. 41. Peter Forsythe, China: interests in Antarctica, 3, CAYP CH805,2802, Box 1296, Antarctic Division General, National Archives, Christchurch, New Zealand. 42. See for example this 2014 Phoenix TV documentary: China’s First Antarctic Great Wall station leader: Guo Kun, http://v.ifeng.com/documentary/figure/2014002/032eac33-­d2be-­489e-­afde-­4df734a0921f.shtml. 43. Wu Jun, Wo guo jidi kaocha zuzhi guanli jizhi youhua yanjiu [Research on improving China’s polar expedition organizational management], MA Thesis, Wuhan University, 2005, 47. Wu Jun is the Deputy Director of CAA and this MA was completed while he was in that role.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 298

21/12/2016 10:11

The past in the present  299 44. Report of the 21st Chinese National Antarctic Research Expedition, 2004–05, Beijing: Chinese Advisory Committee for Polar Research, 2005. 45. 1984 nian tianjin Nanji: Liu Huaqing biaotai ‘Haijun yi bu rongci’[1984 advance in Antarctica: Liu Huaqing commits Navy support], http://www.guofangsheng.com/show.aspx?id=9068&cid=38. 46. Zhongguo shouci Nanji kaocha [China’s first Antarctic expedition], http://news.xinhuanet.com/tech/201311/13/c_125694947.htm. 47. Lee Wei-­chin 1990, 585. 48. Wu Jun, Wo guo jidi kaocha zuzhi guanli jizhi youhua yanjiu, 47. 49. In 2003 the PRIC changed its Chinese, but not its English name, to Zhongguo jidi yanjiu zhongxin. 50. Zhongguo di qici Nanji kaocha [China’s 7th Antarctic expedition], http://news.xinhuanet.com/tech/201311/13/c_125695016.htm. 51. China 2008. 52. Ling et al .2008. 53. China Daily 2005. 54. Yu 2008. 55. On the history of Antarctic exploration see Day 2013. 56. Zhang Zhanhai churen nanji yanjiu kexue weiyuanhui [Zhang Zhanhai takes up a post at SCAR], Zhongguo haiyang bao, no. 1429, 20 March 2007, http://www.soa.gov.cn/hyjww/jdsy/2007/03/20/1174381 011512817.htm. 57. Li Shenggui and Pan Min, Zhongguo Nanji Ruankexue Yanjiu de Yiyi, Xianzhuang yu Zhanwang [The significance, status quo, and prospect of Antarctic soft science research], Jidi yanjiu 17, no. 3 (September 2005): 214–31. 58. Author’s discussions at the PRIC in December 2009. See also Zhang Jiansong, Zhuanjia chengying zhengzhi Nanji ziyuan fenzheng, qi guo you guafen lingtu yaoqiu [Experts call for facing up to the struggle over Antarctic resources, seven countries put in a request to carve up the territory], Liaowang, 18 June 2007, http://news.sohu.com/20070618/n250625161.shtml. 59. Liu Xiaohan: Zhongguo qiangzhan nanji zuigao dian ling meiguo shi liao wei ji [Liu Xiaohan: China seizing the highest point in Antarctica took the USA by surprise], 8 January 2009, Sohu, http://news.sohu. com/20090108/n261650601.shtml; Hu Jianmin: Wei nanji geluofu shan huizhi shou zhang dizhi tu [Hu Jianmin: First map of Grove Mountains is completed], Dili tongxun, 23 January 2009, http://news.dili360. com/dlsk/dlzh/2009/01237614.shtml. 60. Chen Lianzeng: Zengqiang wo guo zai Nanji de shizhi cunzai (Chen Lianzeng: Strengthen China’s physical presence in Antarctica), Xinhua, 6 January 2006, http://news.xinhuanet.com/world/2006-­01/02/ content_4000473.htm. 61. Zhongguo jidi yanjiu keyan 20 nian (China’s 20 years of polar research), PRIC, 2009, 134. 62. Chen Junhong (ed.), Jiaqiang he gaijin sixiang zhengzhi gongzuo xuexi duben [A reader of strengthening and reforming political thought work] (Beijing: Zhonggong Zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1999), p. 169. 63. Xianggang wenhui bao: Zhongguo junshi ‘geng you zuo wei’ (Hong Kong’s Wen Wei Po newspaper: The Chinese military is ‘doing more of what it can’), 4 January 2009, http://www.chinanews.com.cn/hb/ news/2009/01-­04/1512366.shtml. 64. Wo guo jidi kaocha jiang xin gou feiji xinjian pobingchuan (China’s polar expedition will purchase new airplane and icebreaker), Xinhua, 3 February 2014, http://tech.sina.com.cn/d/2014-­02-­03/11279140668. shtml. 65. Xi Jinping Delivers Important Speech at Peripheral Diplomatic Work Forum, Stresses Need to Strive for Excellent Peripheral Environment for Our Country and Promote Our Country’s Development and Bring More Benefits for Peripheral Countries; Li Keqiang Chairs the Forum; Zhang Dejiang, Yu Zhengsheng, Liu Yunshang, Wang Qishan, and Zhang Gaoli Attend the Forum, Xinhua, 25 October 2013. 66. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, The Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs Was Held in Beijing, 29 November 2014,http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/ zxxx_662805/t1215680.shtml.

REFERENCES Belanger, D.O. 2006. Deep Freeze: The United States, the International Geophysical Year, and the Origins of Antarctica’s Age of Science. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Brady, A.-­M. 2008. Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 299

21/12/2016 10:11

300  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Brady, A.-­M. 2009. Mass Persuasion as a Means of Legitimation and China’s Popular Authoritarianism. Journal of American Behavioral Scientist 53(3): 434–57. Brady, A.-­M. 2013. China’s Antarctica. Pages 31–49 in Brady, A.-­M. (ed.). The Emerging Politics of Antarctica. Abingdon: Routledge. Brady, A.-­M. 2017. China as a Polar Great Power. New York/Washington DC: Cambridge University Press with Woodrow Wilson Press. China. 2008. The Draft Comprehensive Environmental Evaluation for the Construction and Operation of the Chinese Dome A Station in Antarctica. Working Paper 5. Thirty-­first Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Kiev. China Daily. 2005. Explorers Conquer ‘Inaccessible Pole’ (Guan Xiaofeng) 18 January. China Daily. 2014. Nations join hands for Antarctic study. 19 November: http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/ epaper/2014-­11/19/content_18942303.htm Day, D. 2013. Antarctica: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. External Intelligence Bureau. 1979. Antarctica: possible PRC interest. 23 March 1979. National Archives, Christchurch, New Zealand. Lee, Wei-­chin. 1990. China and Antarctica: So Far and Yet So Near. Asian Survey 30(6): 576–86. Ling Xiaoliang, Long Wei, Zhang Xia, Zhu Jiangang, Li Qigui and Sun Yi’ang. 2008. Guowai Nanji kaocha guanli jigou yu kaocha guanli moshi de duibi fenxi [Research on foreign Antarctic organisation ­administration], Haiyang kaifang yu guanli, No. 3: 49. Rudmose Brown, R.N. 1927. The Polar Regions: A Physical and Economic Geography. London: Methuen. Snow, D.A. and Benford, R.D. 1992. Master Frames and Cycles of Protest. Pages 133–55 in Morris, A.D. and Mueller, C.M. (eds). Frontiers in Social Movement Theory. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Wang, Z. and Zhang, J. 2010. China and the International Geophysical Year. Pages 143–55 in Launias, R.D., Fleming, J.R. and Devorkin, D.H. (eds). Globalizing Polar Science: Reconsidering the International Polar and Geophysical Years. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Yu Dawei. 2008. Nanji ‘sanji tiao’ [Triple jump in Antarctica] Caijing. No. 16, 4 August.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 300

21/12/2016 10:11

20.  A modest but intensifying power? Brazil, the Antarctic Treaty System and Antarctica Daniela Portella Sampaio,1 Ignacio Javier Cardone2 and Adriana Erthal Abdenur

INTRODUCTION In 1988 Jack Child’s book, Antarctica and South American Geopolitics, addressed the geopolitical and geographical reasons that informed and inspired South American engagement with Antarctica. While he noted that Brazil was unlikely to share the same geographic, historical or diplomatic engagement and involvement in Antarctica as Argentina and Chile, he acknowledged that Brazil was making its presence felt in Antarctica and beyond. As Child noted at the time, ‘in comparison with the Antarctic histories of Argentina and Chile, Brazil’s record is a modest, but intensifying, one’.3 This chapter explores how Brazil’s engagement with Antarctica has changed over the past three decades, and considers whether Child’s description of the country’s involvement as ‘modest, but intensifying’ is analytically helpful and historically relevant. While there is no single and, indeed, uncontroversial parameter to establish the ­‘involvement’ of one party in the Antarctic Treaty regime, two British writers associated with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have explored how we might assess Antarctic leadership and involvement in general, and Antarctic science in particular. In their paper for Polar Research,4 they analyse the volume of policy papers and scientific publications produced by Antarctic Treaty parties. They conclude that the original signatories to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty still largely dominate the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS): . . . the [Antarctic] Treaty remains effectively a select club dominated by the claimant nations and the Cold War warriors (USA and Russia), and that the return on the investment in Antarctic activities in terms of significant science or political initiatives seem lacking for several countries. Further more detailed investigations seem warranted to determine how scientific investment is related to subject leadership, what are the key science papers and their effects, what regional groupings (for example South American or European countries) can do to develop particular political ideas and how Antarctic science relates to Earth System Science in an increasingly fragile world.5

Albeit leadership and, indeed, potential impact can be assessed by other criteria, such as the role and scope of logistical partnerships and the prevalence of non-­consensual positions during consultative meetings, given the privileged role enjoyed by science in the ATS itself, it is perhaps unsurprising that policy papers and scientific publications are considered indicative of significant participation in Antarctic decision-­making and of ‘productive’ activity in the region. While not all policy papers are based on scientific findings or citations, the research undertaken by Dudeney and Walton concludes that these two types of publications support and supplement one another, especially when it comes 301

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 301

21/12/2016 10:11

302  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica to the role of the original signatories, configured by claimant, semi-­claimant and non-­ claimant states. What role, then, does a country such as Brazil (once described as having a ‘modest but intensifying’ involvement in Antarctica and the ATS) play within this space? Taking Jack Child’s qualifiers ‘modesty’ and ‘intensity’ as a departure point, this chapter engages with contemporary assessments of the Brazilian Antarctic Programme, which have examined the role of Brazil in the context of wider debates regarding the c­ ountry’s role as an ‘emerging power’ and as a member of groupings such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) coalition.6 Other considered interpretations have explored the place of Antarctica as part of recent changes in Brazil’s defence strategy,7 as well as the contribution of the Brazilian scientific programme to scientific activities in the field.8 Most of this literature seem to support Child’s argument about an intensifying Brazilian engagement in Antarctica, and they underscore an emerging Brazilian Antarctic geographical imagination. However, this perspective of intensifying engagement does not match Brazilian Antarctic activities. Since securing consultative party status in 1983, the country has been moderately active and there have been little to no significant changes in the Brazilian Antarctic Programme’s general institutional framework. This mismatch prompts the following question: How can Brazil engage more proactively in Antarctica if its institutional performance (defined here as its intensity in presenting papers in Consultative Meetings) remains largely unchanged and unchallenged? The Brazilian Antarctic Programme (known as PROANTAR) receives intermittent funds, a portion of which needs to be approved annually by Congress as a budgetary amendment.9 This means that the programme lacks financial security; every year it must undergo ­scrutiny, with the possibility of substantial funding cuts.10 While Child’s analysis focused on Brazilian geopolitical imaginations of Antarctica, he had rather less to say on the day-­to-­day realities of funding and institutional prioritization of its Antarctic programme. While frontage theory was a milestone for Brazilian geopolitical thought in the 1950s, this did not necessarily translate into greater investment in PROANTAR. Child took the popularity of frontage theory as the basis for his argument and he assumed that it significantly influenced Brazilian decisions regarding the country’s de facto involvement in the ATS. While frontage theory was formulated by scholars working at the Brazilian War College (the Escola Superior de Guerra, ESG),11 and helped to promote the idea of Brazil as a great power with substantial interests in the South Atlantic and Antarctic, Child neglected the institutional politics surrounding Brazil’s Antarctic involvement. For instance, he does not mention the role of the Ministry of External Relations (MRE), known as Itamaraty. Yet his book was published, in 1988, long after Brazil has already signed the Antarctic Treaty (in 1975) and been accepted as a consultative party (in 1983). The Itamaraty had long been significant to Brazil’s involvement in Antarctica; not only did the ministry challenge frontage perspectives, it was also the government division tasked with operationalising Brazil’s involvement in Antarctica and the ATS. By overlooking the way Brazilian diplomats challenged frontage theory, Child overestimated the theory’s influence on policy. Brazilian foreign policy has long prioritised territorial integration and international cooperation in order to boost national economic development and further institutional capacity-­building. With respect to Antarctica, Brazilian foreign policymakers tend to stress strategic pragmatism and diplomatic engagement, rather than referencing Brazilian aspirations to leadership in the global arena. The prominence of the Itamaraty in Antarctic

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 302

21/12/2016 10:11

A modest but intensifying power?  303 matters could be attributed to the character of the institution which is described as having ‘a tradition of elitism, bureaucratic insulation and corporatism, and such tradition would forge among professional diplomats a sense of monopoly over what is understood as the national interest, which involves foreign policy formulation and implementation’.12 This is not to claim that national interest does not play a role in the geopolitical rationale and strategic thinking behind Brazil’s role in Antarctica. Rather, there is a duality of sorts between territorial and diplomatic perspectives, and this difference is reflected in the structure and organisation of the Brazilian Antarctic Programme. At the same time, a shared power framework guarantees that neither the MRE nor the Defence Ministry (or other divisions with Antarctica-­related agendas)13 has complete control over decision-­making processes. This institutional history illustrates how even countries whose Antarctic involvement can be considered to be ‘modest’ relative to the major players can play a role in the region. This chapter is structured in the following manner. Initially, we focus on why Child analysed Brazilian perspectives on modesty and intensity, and how this does not correspond to the trajectory of Brazil’s Antarctic programme and how frontage theory contributed to this current interpretation. Next, we explain why the institutional politics surrounding Brazil’s Antarctic role needs to be better understood and how Brazilian policymakers balance territorial and diplomatic perspectives on Antarctic affairs. Finally, we assess whether Brazil’s relationship with Antarctica remains modest but intensifying, and we consider some of the implications of the findings for the broader study of emerging powers in Antarctica.

BRAZIL AND ANTARCTICA: A MODEST BUT INTENSIFYING GEOPOLITICAL PROJECT? We do not contend that Brazilian engagement in the Antarctic is still ‘modest’ to use Child’s original phrase. However, the notion of intensification is questionable. Some thirty years after Antarctica and South American Geopolitics was published, Brazilian institutional participation in the ATS happens at the same pace as during the first years of its consultative status, from 1983 onwards. Following the model proposed by Dudeney and Walton, the only observable peaks in the number of policy papers proposed by Brazil took place when the country hosted the consultative meetings (1987, in Rio de Janeiro; and 2014, in Brasília). (See Figure 20.1.) In addition, significant repetition of content is observed across these policy papers, with the resubmission of revised earlier versions. At least by this measure, Brazilian ‘performance’ in the ATS decision-­making arena per se is not only modest but also has not shown signs of intensifying. In terms of scientific performance, the pattern seems to be similar. Institutionally, Brazil signed the Antarctic Treaty in 1975, and launched PROANTAR in 1982. However, the scientific committee, intended to establish a more systematic structure for Brazilian Antarctic Science, was only created in 1996. The National Committee for Antarctic Research (Comite Nacional de Pesquisas Antarticas, CONAPA), created as part of the Ministry of Science and Technology, represented the country at the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR). This apparent mismatch between policy and science during the first years of PROANTAR reflects how science was not considered a priority

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 303

21/12/2016 10:11

304  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica % 20.00 15.00 10.00 5.00 0.00

1983

1987

1991

1994

1996

1998

2001

2003

2006

2008

2010

2012

2014

2011

2012

2013

Source: The Antarctic Treaty Database. Elaborated by the authors 2015.

Figure 20.1 

Percentage of papers proposed by Brazil per meeting

Millions of US$

50 45

Budget Proposal

40

Executed Budget

35

Allocated Budget

30 25 20 15 10 5 0

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

Source: Cardone 2015.

Figure 20.2  The PROANTAR budget: amounts set by law proposal, executed, and total allocated in 2001–2013 (millions of US$) in Brazil’s early engagement in Antarctica. Moreover, Brazilian scientific activities had to undergo annual budgetary negotiations in order to guarantee the continuity of its activities. Since the records for Brazilian scientific projects are not available in their entirety,14 Brazil’s Antarctic science initiatives are investigated by looking at budgetary measures and appropriation patterns. Between 2004 and 2013, an average of 55 per cent of the effective budget of PROANTAR has been added to by amendment (see Figure 20.2). This means that PROANTAR’s funding continues to depend heavily on political negotiations. The observed increase in the PROANTAR budget reflects some institutional changes

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 304

21/12/2016 10:11

A modest but intensifying power?  305 as well as the growing role played by polar science in Brazilian Antarctic activities. The signing of the Environment Protocol (in 1991, entering into force in 1998) provided a more solid background for the development of science activities carried out by Brazilian Antarctic parties. After the creation of CONAPA in 1996, research networks were established in 2002 so as to foster scientific research on Antarctic environment impact; these networks brought together several Brazilian academic institutions.15 Despite additional funding provided by the research networks’ initiative, after three years this effort was concluded. In 2005, as an outcome of this attempt, the launch of the ‘Antarctic Agenda’ introduced an array of actions designed to improve the integration and coordination of Antarctic scientific research initiatives, as preparation for Brazil’s involvement in the Fourth International Polar Year (2007–2009). The Antarctic Agenda was meant, in part, to help the Brazilian scientific community to find ways to ensure that PROANTAR would be supported until 2010.16 Simultaneously, the ‘Frente Parlamentar de Apoio ao Programa Antártico Brasileiro’ (Congressional Group in Support of the Brazilian Antarctic Programme) was established in 2003, bringing together deputies and senators to analyse the PROANTAR budget.17 The main result of this initiative was to raise Brazilian political awareness and engagement with Antarctica. The following year brought about new institutional initiatives, including the creation of research institutes tasked with building upon the research network initiative. The Cryosphere National Institute of Science and Technology and the Antarctic Environment Researches National Institute of Science and Technology reinforced Brazilian national Antarctic science and helped to boost budgetary support for PROANTAR.18 In 2011, following the SCAR Strategic Plan for 2011–2016, PROANTAR issued a more specific Strategic Plan that established research guidelines for Brazilian polar science. Among the key goals were those of increasing Brazil’s participation at the ATS, promoting recognition of PROANTAR among the Brazilian public, and ensuring greater support for the country’s Antarctica-­related international cooperation initiatives. This planning process represented an important step in making the Brazilian Antarctic Programme into a consolidated state project. In the following year (2012), the planning process continued. The first Action Plan for Antarctic Science aimed to make Brazilian Antarctic Science more autonomous from economic and or geopolitical pressures by establishing its own political agenda for the following years (2012–2020). Despite enthusiasm for the initiative, the programme suffered a significant setback: the Brazilian Antarctic Station, named Comandante Ferraz, was almost completely destroyed by fire. The incident provoked a spike in budget allocations and expenditure over the next few years, but these extra amounts were channelled towards the design and construction of a new station than towards a significant expansion of Brazil’s portfolio of Antarctic projects. As a result of these constraints and setbacks, the overall progress made by the Brazilian Antarctic Programme remained timid. The achievements made during the late 1990s and the 2000s were a reaction to changes within the ATS, and in particular to the new demands imposed by the environment agenda (specifically, the Post-­Environmental Protocol). The scientific activities performed by Brazil required adjustments to match the new environmental demands agreed by the ATS. As a result, changes at the Brazilian Antarctic programme relied on scientific initiatives, especially on demands made by scientists.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 305

21/12/2016 10:11

306  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Prominent figures such as Antonio Rocha-­Campos, elected to the SCAR presidency from 1994–1998; Edith Fanta, elected as Chair of the Scientific Committee of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) in 2005 and in 2006; and Jefferson Simões (the first Brazilian to conduct research on the Antarctic mainland), contributed directly to the evolution of the Brazilian Antarctic Programme by demanding that appropriate institutional and financial backing was/were available, so that scientific activities could thrive. Almost thirty years after Child’s book, Brazil’s Antarctic activity is ‘still modest’ in terms of its scientific and institutional foundations. Contrary to Child’s perception that PROANTAR was intensifying, different indicators point towards a maintenance of activity levels rather than an expansion of initiatives. What, then, accounts for the discrepancy? Part of the answer relates to the historic duality between a more explicitly territorial perspective to Brazil’s Antarctic engagement, in particular frontage theory, and – on the other hand – the diplomatic approach adopted by Itamaraty. Today, Itamaraty, which is in charge of defining Antarctic foreign policy, and the Brazilian Navy, which is in charge of PROANTAR logistics, work in a coordinated manner. Convergence became possible only when the frontage theory (which used to be strongly supported in national defence circles and rejected by Itamaraty officials) has no longer been officially cited by PROANTAR stakeholders. In particular, the inclusion of Antarctica in the 2012 National Defence Strategy did not invoke the frontage theory as a framework. If anything, it is the polar science featured in the PROANTAR institutional and political frameworks, which does constitute something of an addition to the Brazilian Antarctic Programme described by Child in the early and even late 1980s. As others have noted for neighbouring countries, such as the work of Sanchez and Tielemans Jr19 on the Peruvian Antarctic Programme, there is a pragmatism driving Brazilian stakeholders’ engagement with Antarctica. The inclusion of frequent public references to the programme is designed to reassure Congress and public opinion that this is a part of the world worthy of budgetary support in the short and long term.

BRAZILIAN FRONTAGE THEORY: ANTARCTICA IN THE BRAZILIAN GEOPOLITICAL IMAGINATION Child bases his argument on Therezinha de Castro and Carlos Delgado de Carvalho’s frontage theory. In 1956, inspired by Canadian Senator Pascal Poirier’s sector theory, proposed for Arctic territories in 1907, de Castro and de Carvalho proposed a similar projection of southern hemispheric costal territories onto the Antarctic, suggesting possible territorial sovereignty by the ‘frontage states’.20 In the Brazilian case, two meridians were traced from the Chuí stream, on the Brazil–Uruguay border (53°22’W), to Martim Vaz Island (28°48’W), creating a projection over Antarctic territory that could, one day, the authors suggested, be claimed by Brazil. The authors justified frontage theory by drawing notions of ‘national security’,21 and more specifically by suggesting that unoccupied Antarctic territory could be used as a platform for a possible attack against Brazil. The authors were writing in the 1950s, within the context of the Cold War and amid growing American and Soviet interest in Antarctica. In his book, General Golbery do Couto e Silva – who developed the Brazilian

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 306

21/12/2016 10:11

A modest but intensifying power?  307 National Security Doctrine – stated that the triangle formed by Brazil, Atlantic Africa and Antarctica was one of the most crucial strategic zones of the Cold War, as well as the site of important mineral reserves. As a consequence, argued Couto e Silva, the area demanded Brazilian national security attention.22 For the frontage authors, the 1957–8 International Geophysical Year and the 1959 Antarctic Treaty were a mere façade for Antarctic power-­sharing and scientific cooperation. They feared that the new polar order, being shaped first in Washington DC (1959) and later in Canberra (1961), was designed to cement the territorial and resource interests of the original signatories, including Argentina and Chile.23 Brazilian commentators were publicly sceptical of the benign intentions underwriting the Antarctic Treaty: The original signatories have not received a Proclamation from neither Humanity nor the United Nations to decide the destiny of austral regions [authors’ translation]24 Antarctica is the only place in the world where it is not known which court of law would judge a crime committed there; Antarctica which belongs to all and to no-­one, Antarctica where some presume themselves the owners but reject the right of other signatories to consider themselves as owners, under a treaty established in the absence of the United Nations. Antarctica, which presents itself as the continent of peace, but which will become the subject of discord unless an agreement is reached about Antarctic sovereignty. A problem whose fair, reasonable and efficient solution lies inescapably with the principle of Frontage [authors’ translation].25

Suspicion about the motives of those driving the negotiations of the Antarctic Treaty in October 1959 was not unique to Brazil, however. In the 1950s, for instance, Indian officials expressed the need to bring Antarctic negotiations to the United Nations General Assembly. Influenced by an ‘idealist-­normative’ thrust of decolonisation, in 1956 those officials proposed that the peaceful utilisation of Antarctica should be prioritised, and that the ‘colonial legacy of territorial claims’ sat uneasily with the discourse of science and cooperation.26 The need of clear principles for determining Polar sovereignty remains, however, the crux problem. As there is no agreed treaty between the various claimant Powers, it is necessary either to adjudge between their various claims or to set them all aside in favour of some fresh solution. In other words, it is for decision whether uninhabited and uninhabitable territory is to be regarded as res communis under some form of international control or as terra nullius to be allotted to one claimant or the other.27

India opted for a pragmatic approach, eventually withdrawing its proposal from the General Assembly after being assured that Antarctica would remain a zone of peace and cooperation, free of nuclear testing and other forms of militarisation. Brazil never made frontage theory an official element of political discourse, as it is quite likely that Argentina and Chile would have objected to Brazil’s admission to the ATS. Paradoxically, frontage theory was intended to promote a closer union of South American countries against a ‘communist presence’ within the region, with the acknowledgement of the Inter-­American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance,28 and the inclusion of Antarctica as part of this treaty’s jurisdiction. However, it is doubtful that frontage theory in practice would have promoted greater union among South American countries. Other writers29 noted that a Brazilian Antarctic Territory would have encroached on Argentinian, Chilean and British territory, ­compounding what had been described as ‘the Antarctic problem of overlapping claims’.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 307

21/12/2016 10:11

308  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Nevertheless, South American geopolitics considered de Castro, and other colleagues such as de Carvalho, as influential. They shaped the views of Eurípides Cardozo de Menezes, a federal deputy from 1955 to 1975, and one of the most important advocates of Brazilian Antarctic interests.30 In 1960, the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE) published an atlas in which Antarctica was divided according to frontage theory, and the maps were used in the country’s public schools. In 1970, de Menezes presented this atlas to the Brazilian Congress as part of an attempt to raise ‘Antarctic consciousness’ in Brazil.31 Banal nationalistic32 initiatives such as de Menezes’ one are similar to educational ones carried out in Argentina, for instance via the promotion of an Argentine Antarctic Territory and South Atlantic region.33

BRAZIL’S OFFICIAL ANTARCTIC ENGAGEMENT The first Brazilian expression of interest in Antarctica was an 1882 sub-­Antarctic expedition to Punta Arenas, commanded by Antônio Luís Von Hoonholtz (Barão de Tefé). Other Antarctic explorers stopped over in Brazil en route to the polar continent. As these occurrences were periodic, it is not surprising that the country’s involvement with Antarctica was modest for much of the period leading up to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty negotiations.34 Jack Child’s assessment of Brazilian Antarctic history and its ‘modest’ nature is reasonable. Officially, the first time that Itamaraty dealt with the Antarctic question was in 1956, as a response to India’s proposal for the inclusion of the Antarctic question at the United Nations General Assembly. The official instructions to Brazilian representatives were to ensure recognition of the importance of Antarctica to Brazil, while acknowledging that the country did not have any intention of asserting territorial sovereignty over the region. The Brazilian mission at the United Nations was allowed to acknowledge the existence of frontage criteria for Antarctic continental (not insular) territorial definition, as well as advocating a peaceful solution for Antarctic management by the United Nations. These instructions were based on an internal study conducted by the Foreign Ministry Secretary, Lindolfo L. Collor, where he reinforced the strategic importance of the Antarctic, and the importance of internationalisation as a form of conflict avoidance.35 Meanwhile, Brazilian geopolitical thought was becoming increasingly interested in Antarctica. One year after the first publications about frontage theory by de Castro and de Carvalho, the ESG published the first work about the Antarctic’s strategic importance in 1957. This work did not recognise any sovereign rights of claimant states and acknowledged the need for Brazil to secure free access to the continent. According to these authors, the internationalisation of Antarctica should be the last option and it should be made only on a temporary basis.36 In other words, Brazil should ensure that its future interests are both acknowledged and protected. This guidance was forwarded to the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces (Estado-­Maior das Forças Armadas, EMFA) as a formal suggestion for Itamaraty37 in a direct attempt to influence and shape Brazilian foreign policy. It should be noted that de Castro was a professor at ESG and de Carvalho was a professor at the Rio Branco Institute, the home of the Itamaraty preparatory course. However, it is the case that military sources were more enthusiastic about Antarctica than colleagues in the Itamaraty.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 308

21/12/2016 10:11

A modest but intensifying power?  309 Already by 1959, Itamaraty stated that frontage criteria not only provided a fragile ­juridical base for Brazil but was also likely to provoke conflict with Argentina and Chile. In 1967, Itamaraty came back to state that the ESG study of 1957 lacked ‘a compact and secure rationality’.38 Officially, Brazil continues to maintain a discreet position over the question of Antarctic territorial claims, and as a signatory of the Antarctic Treaty has to respect the provisions of Article IV. According to some authors,39 it is possible to identify two main perspectives of how Brazil should engage in Antarctica. The first informed by a frontage-­based geopolitical imagination would continue to push and promote Brazil’s territorial interests and any ­possible future claim. The alternative would to be to promote the ATS and the internationalisation of the polar continent and surrounding oceans. The Itamaraty was the strongest advocate of the latter while the former found favour in Brazil’s military community. Within the Brazilian context, it would be reasonable to claim that there are, at least,40 two competing geopolitical imaginations affecting Antarctica.

BRAZILIAN GEOPOLITICS AND ITS LEGACY TO BRAZIL’S ANTARCTIC INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY In the genesis of Brazilian geopolitics, the major concern has always been the country’s national integration, with the federal capital transfer from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia, during Juscelino Kubitschek’s mandate (1956–1961).41 Once Brazil secured its territory, the country would be able to pursue and become a regional power. Influenced by European and North American geopolitical authors such as Ratzel, Kjellen, Mackinder and Spykman, the first Brazilian geopolitical writers were committed to the idea of a ‘greater Brazil’, a leading actor on the international scene, where future economic development could facilitate this milestone.42 Brazil’s geopolitical writers and officials from the Itamaraty did share a common belief that Brazilian foreign policy was pivotal for the country’s economic development. Within Brazilian geopolitics, writers such as Mário Travassos, Meira Mattos and Golbery do Couto e Silva were prominent. Mário Travassos addressed Brazilian economic and political projection in South America, while Travassos adapted Halford Mackinder’s heartland concept to Latin America, identifying Cochabamba-­Santa Cruz de la Sierra-­Sucre as the ‘pivotal region’ where Brazil should seek to consolidate its influence. Meira Mattos addressed the mechanisms Brazil might need to transform itself into a great power, while Golbery emphasised the need for the country to secure internal integration and settlement, especially in the Amazon region.43 While much of the geopolitical attention was devoted to Amazonia and the Rio del Plata region, the Antarctic was relatively neglected both in military and civilian circles. For most if not all writers, the country’s continental integration and development was the key priority. During the first years of military rule (1964–1969), Brazil returned its geopolitical support to the United States. Along with closer cooperation with the United States came a desire to generate a stronger sense of national economic security, onshore and offshore in Brazil. The exploration of the Brazilian continental shelf by the Brazilian energy company Petrobras, in 1968, led to the discovery of petroleum under the sea. During the following years, twenty more discoveries were made, and in 1977 Brazil initiated regular

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 309

21/12/2016 10:11

310  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica rounds of oil exploration and exploitation. Consequently, the country’s focus turned to its maritime territory and oceanic frontiers.44 In 1966, Brazil increased its territorial sea from 3 to 6 nautical miles by decree and established an additional layer up to 12 nautical miles from the coastline, as a way to exercise control of its maritime domain. Under customary international law, Brazil declared an exclusive economic zone and further extended its maritime sovereign rights in the Atlantic region. Growing maritime resource interests encouraged the federal deputy de Menezes to begin the promotion of an ‘Antarctic consciousness’. His speech at the National Congress in 1970 advocated for an interest in the Antarctic question. At the same occasion, the frontage-­inspired atlas was presented, showing how and where Antarctic territory might be part of Brazil. In 1972, he submitted a piece of written work entitled ‘Antarctic, international interests’ (Antártica, interesses internacionais) to the ESG. It has been argued that de Menezes’s speech in the Brazilian parliament prompted Brazil to sign the Antarctic Treaty. The Itamaraty counsellor João Frank da Costa, chief of the Division for Intellectual Cooperation and a specialist on Antarctica, expressed caution regarding the frontage maps. Costa established the official Brazilian position – Brazil would sign and accept the provisions of the Antarctic Treaty and support international collaboration without antagonising other parties.45 Following the growth of the Antarctic awareness, between 1973 and 1975, the Brazilian Institute for Antarctic Research (IBEA) looked for the support of the then government in order to plan the first Brazilian Antarctic expedition. The first proposal asked for logistical support, while a later proposal requested a formal declaration of interest in order to accelerate national funding and promote cooperation within Brazil. In both cases, suspicion at governmental level and caution about possible reactions from Argentina seemed to derail the requests for support by the IBEA.46 In 1974, based on da Costa’s conclusions, Itamaraty prepared the recommendation for Brazil’s signature of the Antarctic Treaty and sent it to the Republic’s Presidency. The recommendation emphasised the strategic importance of having access to Antarctica’s potential resources without necessarily supporting frontage theory. Four months later, Itamaraty declared the importance of Brazil becoming part of the Antarctic Treaty in the light of the Treaty’s possible revision in 1991.47 The issue of signature was delayed, however, by worsening relations with Argentina over the Itaipu hydroelectric dam project,48 and the worldwide energy crisis.49 In 1975, in a second attempt by Itamaraty, Brazil signed the Antarctic Treaty. As part of the price of securing presidential assent, Itamaraty had to accommodate a more explicitly territorial perspective, one informed by frontage.50 At this Itamaraty recommendation to the Presidency, Antarctica was defined as a strategic place for Brazilian national security, especially in the light of its possible resource value. Brazilian interests were ‘in [the] short and medium term related to national security [strategy], and in [the] long term, to the possibility for Brazil to participate at the future commercial utilisation of the resources already identified or to be discovered at the 6th Continent’.51 The Treaty was not considered to be permanent and it is stated that the frontage criteria might be invoked during its revision, in 1991: increasing, therefore, the pressure to be exercised on the 12 original signatories, at the occasion of the expiry of the referred juridical instrument, in favour of fairer and more egalitarian norms for the final solution of the Antarctic Treaty. . . . in case the frontage criterion would be

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 310

21/12/2016 10:11

A modest but intensifying power?  311 accepted for delimiting sovereignty over Antarctic territory, at the occasion of the expiry deadline of the Antarctic Treaty, the Brazilian government will fulfil its undeniable rights regarding its geographic position.52

Likewise, scientific research was mentioned officially for the first time as an important aspect of Brazilian interests in Antarctica, including the role of Antarctic weather systems on Brazil.53 On 16 May 1975, Brazil communicated to the United States (the depositary state) its decision to adhere to the treaty. The decision to sign was ratified by the Brazilian Congress.

TOWARDS A CONSULTATIVE STATUS After the signing and ratification of the Antarctic Treaty, President Geisel established an inter-­ministerial working group, coordinated by Itamaraty, to elaborate and implement a National Policy for Antarctic Matters (POLANTAR) and an Antarctic scientific programme (PROANTAR) respectively. In 1976, the group presented the main directions of the POLANTAR emphasising the strategic features of the region, the possibility to explore its natural resources in the future, the importance of understanding Antarctic biological and physical processes. The need to foster ‘substantial scientific activity’, as a way to acquire consultative status within the ATS itself, was recognised.54 Initially, Brazil would have two administrative bodies for its Antarctic Programme: the first was the National Commission for Antarctic Matters (CONANTAR), with an ­inter-­ministerial configuration and responsible for elaborating POLANTAR. The second body would be the Brazilian Antarctic Institute (IANTAR), which was responsible for executing the national Antarctic Programme. The IANTAR would be located at the National Council for Scientific and Technologic Development (CNPq). The ­inter-­ministerial working group established by President Geisel closed its activities in 1977 after this new structure was put in place. The Antarctic Programme evolved slowly, and the more explicit interests in resources and strategic influence were downplayed in favour of promoting science and international cooperation.55 Brazil received several invitations from various parties to participate in their Antarctic Programmes and train its personnel. In 1976 and 1977, the Brazilian Navy accepted an invitation from the BAS, sending its first official observer to Antarctica. According to Capitão de Corveta Luíz Antônio de Carvalho Ferraz, the British programme offered the Brazilian Antarctic programme access to one of its moth-­balled research stations.56 Only in 1980, with the Figueiredo presidency, did Brazil start to see Argentina as a strategic partner rather than as a potential threat. This change in foreign and security policy perception enabled the Itaipu dam project to be completed, and Brazil’s engagement in Antarctic activities increased thereafter.57 The inter-­ministerial working group was re-­ established and the Presidency committed itself to support the POLANTAR: It is important that Brazil becomes a consultative member of the Antarctic Treaty, abandoning unproductive discussions about the Frontage Theory. Brazil, having a seat at the Consultative Meetings, will be able to defend its national interests, as it already does in different international forums. . . . Due to the current environment of trust and mutual understanding between Brazil and Argentina, once a solution to the Itaipu–Corpus dame dispute proved possible, this seems a fruitful opportunity for the POLANTAR implementation.58

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 311

21/12/2016 10:11

312  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica At the time, the main concern of Itamaraty was the apparently short time frame for a possible revision to the Antarctic Treaty in 1991, where a number of South American commentators believed (wrongly) that the treaty was due to ‘expire’. Labouring under this misapprehension, effort was renewed to secure funding and the responsibilities attributed to IANTAR, as the executive agency of the Brazilian Antarctic Programme, were transferred to the Inter-­Ministerial Commission for Sea Resources (CIRM), where Brazil’s Antarctic Programme Secretariat remains located. The CIRM was established in 1974 within the Navy Ministry, and its responsibilities were assisting the Presidency in the elaboration of a national policy for the sea.59 The Navy consolidated its role in national Antarctic planning, as it hosted the PROANTAR secretariat and undertook the responsibility on logistical support for future Brazilian Antarctic expeditions. In 1982, new decrees established that CONANTAR and PROANTAR were in charge of CIRM. Brazil tried to establish multiple partnerships for Antarctic cooperation with Argentina, Poland, the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, the Soviet Union and China, but deliberately avoided apartheid South Africa.60 In several information papers presented at Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings (ATCMs), Brazil emphasised the collaborative dimensions of its Antarctic interests including transport, the opening of temporary stations and the role of medical support. Chile offered initial training support to the Brazilian Antarctic programme, which had suffered funding and expeditionary setbacks in the 1980s. As the programme developed, it is important to recognise that there has been a plurality in perspectives and interests at play in the development of the Antarctic programme, which was absent in Child’s original arguments. Even when the Itamaraty undertook a more prominent role in shaping Brazil’s role in the ATS, the ministry needed to accommodate the more strategic orientation of the Navy, and those who thought Brazil needed to be attentive to the future resource politics of the region. After the Malvinas/Falklands War in 1982, the CONANTAR gathered for the first time, and Brazil organised its first Antarctic expedition, in the 1982–1983 summer season. Brazil accepted Chile’s offer of cooperation, and since then a partnership has been established between the countries, with Brazilian ships departing from Punta Arenas and Brazilian flights using the facilities of Eduardo Frei Air Base in Antarctica. Thereafter, PROANTAR organised the purchase of a polar ship, acquiring Barão de Tefé from Denmark in 1982. For the OPERANTAR I (the first Brazilian Antarctic expedition), Barão de Tefé and the oceanographic ship Professor Besnard were sent down south. However, while sailing in the Beagle Channel, the Tefé was intercepted by the Argentinian Navy which was still extremely sensitive about access and control of that stretch of water. The incident generated a protest note from Brazil and a formal apology from the Argentine government.61 Likewise, two British patrol aircraft followed Tefé and Besnard was inspected while in and around the Falkland/Malvinas Islands.62 The Brazilian expedition was designed to secure consultative status (which included the establishment of a permanent station and admittance to SCAR, as a sign of ‘­substantial scientific involvement’). Nevertheless, Brazil acquired its consultative status in 1983 before fulfilling these formal requisites, and probably benefited from growing Chinese and Indian engagements in Antarctic activities. Further afield, Malaysia sought to include the ‘Question of Antarctica’ at the United Nations General Assembly. In the face of this growing interest from the Global South, the consultative parties recognised the interest

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 312

21/12/2016 10:11

A modest but intensifying power?  313 and role of India (which was neither a SCAR member nor had a permanent research station), which made it clear that it expected to become consultative party. As a consequence, Brazil was informed that its consultative status request would be welcomed by the time of the ATCM of 1983.63 It is a moot point as to whether Brazil’s rapid admission to consultative status would have happened if India and China on the one hand, and Malaysia on the other, were not showing greater interest in Antarctica. By the time of OPERANTAR II (the Second Brazilian Expedition to Antarctica) during the summer of 1983–1984, the Comandante Ferraz Antarctic Station had been built and opened during the that summer season at Admiral Bay on the King George Island, South Shetlands. The base enjoyed relatively easy access, a protected harbour, and proximity to the Chilean Eduardo Frei Air Base.64 In 1984, Brazil joined SCAR (alongside India), and in 1986 joined the CCAMLR (Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resourses) commission, which was concerned with living resources management. So, by the end of the 1980s, Brazil was completely integrated into the ATS, and in 1987 it hosted its first Consultative Meeting (in Rio de Janeiro). This was a remarkable period of institutional embrace and incorporation. During the ill-­fated CRAMRA (Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities) negotiations (1982–1988), Brazil was also eager to ensure that its interests and the wider Global South was acknowledged.65 Brazil embraced the architecture of the ATS and joined Argentina and Chile in being seen to support publicly its long-­term maintenance.66 After the XI Special ATCMs (1990–1991), Brazil adopted a strong environmentalist position,67 despite its well-­known interest in exploring resources in Antarctica. As part of its support for the ATS, the country adopted the Environmental Protocol, and the presidency at the time was conscious that the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development was to be hosted in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Brazil formally approved the Madrid Protocol in 1995 and adopted it, before its entry into force in 1998.68

CONSTANT MODESTY? Since the ratification of the Madrid Protocol, the possibility for commercially exploring Antarctica was suspended under Article 7. The institutional organisation of the Brazilian Antarctic Programme remains stable and the CONANTAR stopped meeting in 1995. It met one more time in 2006, but since then all deliberations have been made by the CIRM, the body in charge of the execution of the Brazilian Antarctic Programme. The POLANTAR remains unchanged despite all the changes and challenges Brazil faced over its interests in Antarctic. And there remain challenges, as a report to a CIRM meeting in 2010 acknowledged: The PROANTAR has been a program of great success, acknowledged in our country and abroad, especially by other Antarctic Program coordinators, however it has worked essentially in a reactive manner. As long as the resources destined to support scientific activities were small, which it was until recently, the supporting structure was able to adapt and fulfil its tasks. With the rapid change provided by the stimulus from Science and Technology, this structure seems to be insufficient to support Antarctic research. Still, some actions were quickly undertaken such as the acquisition of a polar ship [the Almirante Maximiano]. Nevertheless it is not possible to proceed in conducting a state program, such as the PROANTAR, without future planning.69

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 313

21/12/2016 10:11

314  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Concerns remain about the funding and scope of Antarctic scientific activities (that is those through PROANTAR) even if Brazil is publicly committed to the ATS and the role, for example, of environmental protection and polar cooperation. Concern has also been expressed at the relatively low-­level contribution of Brazil within the ATCMs. There remains a challenge to ensure that Antarctica has some prominence in Brazilian foreign policy imagination. While sympathisers of a more strategic engagement (such as frontage theory, for instance) may continue to advocate a more substantive role for Brazil in the Antarctic and South Atlantic, it remains a challenging environment for those working in the Brazilian Antarctic environment to push for a more substantive role in the ATS and Antarctica itself. Therefore, Child was perceptive in identifying ‘modesty’ in terms of Brazilian engagement, but he missed some signs of intensification, on the one hand, and, on the other, the pressures facing Brazil’s engagement with the region. Brazil’s inconstant proximity with the United States, as well as difficult relations with Argentina in reason of the Itaipu hydroelectric dam project, delayed Brazilian engagement in Antarctica. Strained Argentine–Brazilian relations delayed the signing process and the organisation of the first Brazilian Antarctic expedition (a vital development for the country’s journey towards securing consultative status). Despite the efforts made by the frontage theory authors, Brazilian engagement with the Antarctica never developed a powerful presence within the wider political establishment. While Brazil has developed its Antarctic interests since the 1970s, it is not unreasonable to use adjectives like ‘modest’ to characterise that polar engagement.

NOTES  1. Acknowledgements to the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq grantee), and to Florence Bradley for all the clarity provided.   2. Acknowledgements to the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP).   3. Child 1988, 151.   4. Dudeney and Walton 2012.   5. Dudeney and Walton 2012, 7.   6. Abdenur and Neto 2014.   7. Mattos 2015   8. Lemmertz 2014; Resende de Assis 2015.   9. Cardone 2015. 10. Most states fund their Antarctic programmes on a multi-­year basis. 11. The Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG) is a military educational institution established in 1949 which aimed at developing and training military staff towards the development of Brazil as a great power. The ESG has historically been among the main centres of Brazilian geopolitical thought, and most of its studies feature a strong doctrinaire character. For more details, see Fernandes 2009; and Miyamoto 1981. 12. De Faria, Lopes and Casarões 2013, 468. According to the authors, Brazilian foreign policy has been subject of significant changes since Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva’s first administration in 2003, when a series of reforms intended to influence its daily dynamics. 13. Environment Ministry (responsible for environmental impacts assessments); and Science and Technology Ministry (responsible for selecting scientific projects to be developed by Brazilian Antarctic Programme). (Available in: www.mar.mil.br/secirm/portugues/proantar.html. Last accessed in December, 2015). 14. Cardone 2015. 15. Gandra 2013. 16. Gandra 2013. 17. Diário da Câmara dos Deputados, December 2003. 18. Gandra 2013. 19. Sanchez and Tielemans Jr 2015.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 314

21/12/2016 10:11

A modest but intensifying power?  315 20. dos Santos 2004; Mattos 2014. 21. The National Security Doctrine, created by the National Security Council in the United States during the first decade of the Cold War, was widespread and adapted in Brazil by the Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG). The main idea was the need for national security and the defence of Christian and democratic values in the Western world, in opposition to atheist communism. For more details, see Fernandes 2009. 22. Hepple 1986; Kelly and Child 1988; Ferreira 2009. 23. Ferreira 2009. 24. Henriques 1984, 40. 25. de Menezes 1972, 91. 26. Chaturvedi 2013. 27. Chaturvedi 2013, 306. 28. Rio Treaty 1947. 29. Ferreira 2009. 30. Mattos 2014. 31. Ferreira 2009. 32. Hemmings et al. 2015, 543. 33. Benwell and Dodds 2011. 34. Ferreira 2009. 35. Ferreira 2009. 36. Ferreira 2009. 37. Ferreira 2009. 38. Ferreira 2009. 39. Gandra 2013; dos Santos 2004. 40. Perhaps after the Environmental Protocol, science would be a third geopolitical imagination in course. However, for the constitution of Brazilian engagement, a territorial/nationalist and a diplomatic/pragmatic are the main competing ones. 41. Kelly 1984; Hepple 1986; Miyamoto 2002. 42. Mattos 2014. 43. Miyamoto 2002. 44. da Silva 2013. 45. Ferreira 2009. 46. Ferreira 2009, 126. 47. Ferreira 2009. 48. The Itaipu dam and hydroelectric plant, which was begun in 1975, is owned by Brazil and Paraguay. However, long negotiations were needed during the 1960s, as the plant is located in the Paraná river, near the Argentine border, which brought protestations from the government in Buenos Aires. Eventually, a tripartite agreement was signed between Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina in 1979, establishing common water basin management. 49. Milani 2011. 50. Ferreira 2009. 51. Ferreira 2009. 52. Ferreira 2009. 53. Ferreira 2009. 54. Ferreira 2009. 55. Ferreira 2009. 56. Ferreira 2009. 57. Ferreira 2009. 58. Ferreira 2009, 132. 59. Coelho 1983. 60. Ferreira 2009. 61. Ferreira 2009; Henriques 2004. 62. Henriques 1984, 116. 63. Ferreira 2009. 64. Gandra 2013. 65. Ferreira 2009. 66. In 1985, Argentina transferred the Dirección Nacional del Antártico from the Armed Forces to its ­chancellery; and Chile included the protection of the Antarctic Treaty System as a founding principle on its Antarctic policy (Ferreira 2009). 67. Cardone 2015. 68. Ferreira 2009. 69. CIRM Report 2010.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 315

21/12/2016 10:11

316  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

REFERENCES Abdenur, A.E. and Neto, D.M. 2014. Rising powers and Antarctica: Brazil’s changing interests. The Polar Journal. Barros, S.R. 1998. A execução da política externa brasileira: um balanço dos últimos 4 anos. Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 41 (2): 18–28. Benwell, M.C. 2014. Considering nationality and performativity: undertaking research across the geopolitical divide in the Falkland Islands and Argentina. Area 46 (2): 163–9. Benwell, M.C. and Dodds, K. 2011. Argentine and territorial nationalism revisited: the Malvinas/Falklands dispute and geographies of everyday nationalism. Political Geography 30: 411–49. Cardone, I.J. 2015. A política Antártica Brasileira no século XXI: evolução de fatores estruturais. Seminário Internacional de Ciência Política. de Castro, T. 1976. Rumo à Antártica. Rio de Janeiro: Freitas Bastos. Chaturvedi, S. 2013. Rise and decline of Antarctica in Nehru’s geopolitical vision: challenges and opportunities of the 1950s. The Polar Journal 3 (2): 301–15. Child, J. 1988. Antarctica and South American Geopolitics: Frozen Lebensraum. New York: Praeger Publishers. CIRM. Report of the 175th Ordinary Session. Brasília, DF, 26 August 2010. Coelho, A.P. 1983. Nos confins dos três mares . . . a Antártida. Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca do Exército Editora. Dudeney, J.R. and Walton, D.W.H. 2012. Leadership in politics and science within the Antarctic Treaty. Polar Research 31. EMFA. 1980. Implementação da Política Nacional para Assuntos Antárticos. Polantar, 15 July. DMAE archives. Cited in Ferreira, F.R.G. 2009. O Sistema do Tratado da Antártica: evolução do regime e seu impacto na política externa brasileira. Brasília: Fundação Alexandre de Gusmão. EMFA. 1980. Notice 032/1aSC/122 to MRE, 18 March, cited in Ferreira, F.R.G. 2009. O Sistema do Tratado da Antártica: evolução do regime e seu impacto na política externa brasileira. Brasília: Fundação Alexandre de Gusmão. Faria, C.A.P. et al. 2013. Itamaraty on the move: institutional and political change in Brazilian foreign service under Lula da Silva’s presidency (2003–2010). Bulletin of Latin American Research 32 (4): 468–82. Fernandes, A.S. 2009. A reformulação da Doutrina de Segurança Nacional pela Escola Superior de Guerra no Brasil: a geopolítica de Golbery do Couto e Silva. Antíteses 2 (4): 831–56. Ferreira, F.R.G. 2009. O Sistema do Tratado da Antártica: evolução do regime e seu impacto na política externa brasileira. Brasília: Fundação Alexandre de Gusmão. Gandra, R.M. 2013. Geopolítica antártica no limiar do século XXI: a definição de um projeto estratégico-­científico para o Brasil na Antártica. Porto Alegre: Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. Gaubet, C.G. 1986. As questões antárticas: algumas perspectivas brasileiras. Florianópolis: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Hemmings A.D. et al. 2015. Nationalism in Today’s Antarctic. The Yearbook of Polar Law VII: 531–55. Henriques, E.M. 1984. Uma visão da Antártica. Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca do Exército Editora. Hepple, L. 1986. The revival of geopolitics. Political Geography Quarterly 5:21–36. Kelly, P.L. and Child, J. 1988. Geopolitics of the Southern Cone and Antarctica. Boulder, Colorado and London: Lynne Rienner. Lemmertz, H. 2014. A ciência nos confins da Terra: a comunidade científica e a produção de ciência no Programa Antártico Brasileiro. Anais do 380 Encontro Anual da ANPOCS. Mattos, L.F. 2014. A inclusão da Antártica no conceito de Entorno Estratégico Brasileiro. Revista da Escola de Guerra Naval 20 (1): 165–92. MEA Government of India 1956 in Chatuvedi, S. 2013. Rise and decline of Antarctica in Nehru’s geopolitical vision: challenges and opportunities of the 1950s. The Polar Journal 3 (2): 301–15. Milani. C.R.S. 2011. A importância das relações Brasil–Estados Unidos na política externa brasileira. Boletim de Economia e Política Internacional (6): 69–85. Miyamoto, S. 1981. Os estudos geopolíticos no Brasil: uma contribuição para sua avaliação. Perspectivas (4): 75–92. Miyamoto, S. 2002. Geopolítica do Brasil: algumas considerações. Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas. Moutinho et al. 1957. Conjuntura internacional. Segundo Trabalho de Grupo TG-­09-­57. Mimeografado. ESG. Arquivo DMAE cited in Ferreira, F.R.G. 2009. O Sistema do Tratado da Antártica: evolução do regime e seu impacto na política externa brasileira. Brasília: Fundação Alexandre de Gusmão. Recommendation DAM-­ I/124/210 (B29), 02 /05/1975. DMAE archives. Cited in Ferreira, F.R.G. 2009. O Sistema do Tratado da Antártica: evolução do regime e seu impacto na política externa brasileira. Brasília: Fundação Alexandre de Gusmão. Recommendation DAM-­I/141/692 de 16/05/1975. DMAE archives. Cited in Ferreira, F.R.G. 2009. O Sistema

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 316

21/12/2016 10:11

A modest but intensifying power?  317 do Tratado da Antártica: evolução do regime e seu impacto na política externa brasileira. Brasília: Fundação Alexandre de Gusmão. Resende de Assis, L.G. 2015. A colonização científica brasileira da Antártida: notas para pensar antropologicamente. Cadernos de Antropología (13): 65–80. Sanchez, W.A. and Tielemans Jr, O.R. 2015. Reinvigorating Peru’s role in Antarctic geopolitics. The Polar Journal 5 (1): 101–12. Santiago Embassy telegrams, 5, 6 e 08/08/1983. CDO archives. Cited in Ferreira, F.R.G. 2009. O Sistema do Tratado da Antártica: evolução do regime e seu impacto na política externa brasileira. Brasília: Fundação Alexandre de Gusmão. Santos, L.E.F. 2004. O pensamento político-­jurídico e o Brasil na Antártida. Curitiba: Juruá Editora. Silva, A.P. 2013. O novo pleito brasileiro no mar: a plataforma continental estendida e o projeto Amazônia Azul. Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 56 (1): 104–21. Vieira. F.B. 2006. O Tratado da Antártica: perspectivas territorialista e internacionalista. Cadernos PROLAM/ USP 5 (2): p. 49–82.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 317

21/12/2016 10:11

21.  The politics of early exploration Peder Roberts

INTRODUCTION On 5 January 1922, the British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton died of a heart attack, aged only forty-­seven, while moored off the island of South Georgia.1 His passing is often said to have marked the end of distinct era. Shackleton was perhaps the most iconic representative of the ‘Heroic Age’, a term commonly used to denote the years between the first European expeditions to set foot on the Antarctic continent in the final years of the nineteenth century, and either the death of Shackleton or his remarkable return from a previous expedition in 1916 (which also ended at South Georgia). During these years Antarctica went from being an essentially unknown expanse of ice and sea, upon which no human was known with certainty to have set foot, to a scene of national rivalry, culminating in territorial claims, a booming whaling industry, and the first steps toward incorporating the southern continent into global political, cultural, and economic structures. Shackleton and his ilk were not, however, the first wave of humans to engage with the Antarctic. Dispute persists about when and where the Antarctic continent was first sighted.2 But the islands around the Antarctic Peninsula became rich grounds for sealers in the early nineteenth century, while state-­sponsored expeditions from Russia, Britain, France, and the United States voyaged around the Antarctic coast during the first half of that century.3 The burst of activity during the Heroic Age saw expeditions from Britain, France, Sweden, Germany, Australia, Belgium, Norway, and Japan.4 Collectively they reflected the world from which they sailed – European states (large and small) eager to make a national mark through Antarctic exploration, plus the newly independent Commonwealth of Australia, and a nation in Japan that aspired to join their ranks. These were years in which European nationalism bloomed, a phenomenon that goes a long way to explaining the allure of a continent long thought to be anthropologically uninteresting and economically unpromising, the whales and seals that lived in Antarctic waters notwithstanding. To explore the continent’s coastline, its interior, and its adjacent waters was a means of demonstrating fidelity to core ideals of civilization and modernity (with accompanying economic profits). Achieving particular feats of travel, most notably reaching the geographic South Pole, earned further cultural capital as emblematic deeds that validated the strength of the nation from which the expedition issued. Formal claims of sovereignty over territory were less common, but ‘ceremonies of possession’ (to use Patricia Seed’s phrase) certainly took place, and activities conducted in the Heroic Age would later prove important when rival claims were formalized and defended.5 This chapter will address three main questions. First, to what extent did early Antarctic explorers act as bodily instruments of national honor, even if they did not always enact defined state goals? Second, to what extent did actual and potential economic development shape early Antarctic exploration? And third, what aspects of early Antarctic exploration have provided anchor points for later ideas, narratives, and practices of national 318

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 318

21/12/2016 10:11

The politics of early exploration  319 political belonging on the continent? All three approaches invite reflection upon the extent to which Antarctica can be considered a colonial frontier – an issue that scholars such as Adrian Howkins, Klaus Dodds, Christy Collis, and Brigid Hains have done much to place on the agenda.6 The methods deployed are those found within academic history, but with an eye to the insights of critical geopolitics – most notably the importance of narratives that construct legitimate authority over spaces and the capacity for a wide range of actors to function as geo-­political agents independent of formal affiliation with state projects.7 I place particular emphasis on the role of science as a means through which the world could be both described and ultimately administered. The chapter follows a rough chronological structure, partly for clarity but partly also to reveal how the political nature of the expeditions changed through time – particularly as a new Antarctic whaling industry boomed in the decade before the First World War.

SIGHTINGS AND SPECULATION: ANTARCTIC EXPLORATION UP TO THE 1890s European knowledge of a far southern continent was entirely hypothetical until the eighteenth century.8 When ships did begin visiting the Antarctic from the late eighteenth century, two main motives may be identified: first, a commercial motivation (principally sealing, and to an extent whaling); and second, a desire to chart the cartographic and particularly the magnetic contours of the earth. While neither project can be neatly mapped on to a project of territorial annexation – a trend associated mostly with later periods in Antarctic history – both may be related to the political dynamics of their own time, while in turn also providing anchor points for historical narratives that could support political arguments later. Historians are fond of mentioning Captain James Cook’s circumnavigation of the Antarctic continent (1772–75) as a major milestone in Antarctic exploration.9 They are equally fond of his infamous belief that the lands beyond the sea ice – and he was certain land existed – would never be explored because the risks could not possibly be outweighed by any reward from this ‘country doomed by nature never once to feel the warmth of the sun’s rays, but to lie buried in everlasting snow and ice’.10 Antarctica thus stood in stark contrast to Australia and the fertile South Pacific islands that Cook explored further north. Cook did, however, take possession of the island of South Georgia in the name of King George III, an act that later obtained much significance in terms of British sovereignty and stewardship. Around the time of Cook’s grand and well-­publicized voyage, mariners began to seek fur seals and whales ever further into the South Atlantic Ocean. Fur seals were particularly prized. The prices their pelts could attract on world markets made voyaging even to the other side of the world an economic proposition. Sealers reached South Georgia around 1786 and in the decades that followed, the previously thriving fur seal populations were hunted to the point where sealing was no longer a lucrative pursuit. The precise location of sealing grounds was a valuable commercial secret and sealers consequently did not generally leave well-­documented contributions to cartographic knowledge (with the notable exception of the London-­based company Enderby and Sons).11 A meeting

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 319

21/12/2016 10:11

320  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica in 1821 captures the overlap between the two strands of exploration. A Russian imperial expedition under Thaddeus von Bellingshausen, charged with sailing to the geographic South Pole and locating potential naval supply bases, crossed paths with a private sealing expedition under the young American Nathaniel Palmer. Did one of these men discover the Antarctic continent? What did they say to each other? So much of this encounter – like most of the Antarctic activities of the time – remains shrouded in historical mist that the truth is probably impossible to divine. The episode is instead an example of Dodds’ argument that claims to priority are more ‘resources for nationalists’ than statements of fact.12 The science of ‘terrestrial magnetism’ may not be immediately recognized as a discipline today, but it was a major field for much of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries (and continues to be studied today). Terrestrial magnetism, also known as geomagnetism, is concerned with charting and understanding the earth’s magnetic field. This includes the variations that occur at different locations around the world, especially in the far north and south, as it was known already in the seventeenth century that the earth’s geographic and magnetic poles did not coincide. The relevance of this knowledge to navigation was obvious. France and Britain, empires that projected naval power to distant parts of the globe, consequently took the project of mapping the earth’s magnetic field as an important component of their wider quest to master the maritime world.13 In 1839 a British expedition under James Clark Ross sailed south as part of the ‘Magnetic Crusade’, aiming to map the area around the South Magnetic Pole, in competition with a French expedition under Dumont d’Urville and an American expedition under Charles Wilkes.14 The acquisition of magnetic and other cartographic data served a political purpose, but so too did the naming of topographic features and the achievement of records (such as ‘farthest souths’) that could demonstrate national vitality. After this burst of exploration there was a period of quiet. Exploration continued apace elsewhere in the world, particularly in Africa and the Arctic, with expeditions becoming profitable media-­driven spectacles.15 Commerce and geographical exploration again formed dual motivations when Antarctica again began to attract interest toward the end of the century: the former due to a combination of declining Arctic catches and improving technology that made Antarctic whaling more appealing, the latter due to a consensus that the comparative lack of geographical knowledge concerning Antarctica (and its adjacent seas) could be interpreted as a challenge demanding a response from civilized nations. This position was famously codified in a resolution of the Sixth International Geographical Congress, held in 1895.16 On 24 January of that year a Norwegian-­born entrepreneur named Henrik Bull had made the first confirmed landing on the Antarctic continent, at Cape Adare.17 Whaling interests rather than learned societies or enlightened states funded his trip. Yet his landing touched off a race that became intimately connected to the politics of national prestige – a race in which whaling companies continued to play important roles, and in which geographical societies such as Britain’s Royal Geographical Society (RGS) performed important political functions.

THE FIRST ‘HEROES’ We may perhaps think of the Heroic Age as divided into two sections. The first stretched from the first expedition to overwinter beneath the Antarctic Circle – the Belgica

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 320

21/12/2016 10:11

The politics of early exploration  321 e­ xpedition of 1897–99 – to the return of a series of expeditions in 1904. A total of six ventures spent at least one winter in the Antarctic. The level of state involvement in each expedition varied, but at least five bore the names of nations in their titles, and collectively they contributed to a growing sense that Antarctic exploration was a form of competition between civilized nations. It is not possible to fully understand this phenomenon without reference to the wider political circumstances of the time. The Belgica expedition was the brainchild of Adrien de Gerlache (1864–1934). Rather than dreaming specifically of the Antarctic, de Gerlache seems to have primarily been concerned with adventure. Africa (specifically the Belgian Congo) and the Arctic appealed to him too.18 De Gerlache appealed first to the Belgian Geographical Society, which helped him to organize a national funding appeal, before the Belgian government stepped in to cover his expenses – though King Leopold apparently still felt that the Congo would be a more profitable quest.19 De Gerlache purchased a Norwegian whaling vessel, the Patria, and renamed it the Belgica. The expedition’s nationalist cast was balanced, however, by the international nature of its crew, who hailed from Norway, Romania, Poland, and the United States. Whether the Belgica expedition was intended to remain in the Antarctic during the winter remains debatable. In any case, the ship became frozen in the ice near Peter I Island in February 1898, and in the months that followed mental and physical illness set in. Despite the death of one crewmember, and dissension among the remaining expedition members, the expedition was feted upon its return as a successful national achievement, and de Gerlache was ‘showered with honours’.20 The first overwintering on the Antarctic continent, in 1899, did not fit the nationalist template so easily. Led by a Norwegian-­Australian named Carsten Borchgrevink, the Southern Cross expedition (named for the ship it sailed in) departed under the British flag but with sponsorship from the English newspaper magnate Sir George Newnes.21 Borchgrevink lacked the imprimatur of the RGS, busy at the time organizing its own venture. What eventually became the National Antarctic Expedition (NAE) (1901–04) arose through concerted lobbying by Clements Markham, who used his position as Secretary of the RGS to push for a revived focus on exploration (particularly in the polar regions).22 Markham took the guiding hand in organizing the expedition once relations with the Royal Society broke down over the role of the expedition’s designated scientific leader in the administrative hierarchy. The result was an expedition under the undisputed command of the naval officer Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912). The dispute is easy to characterize as one between adventurous exploration and sober science, a judgment rendered easier by Markham’s description of the sciences as ‘springes [sic] to catch woodcocks’, means to the performance of great deeds of masculine travel.23 But while Markham denied science the dominant place in his view of geography, it was by no means excluded. Max Jones has put it brilliantly: the culture of turn-­of-­the-­century British exploration was at once concerned with measuring the world, measuring empire, and measuring men.24 The NAE was a private venture, and even when its ship (the Discovery) remained locked in the ice for a second winter the relief expeditions that ensued sailed without government support. Nevertheless, the expedition functioned as a clear expression of British imperial power (through the quite literal expenditure of British bodily power), particularly in its achievement of a new farthest south record by a three-­man party of Scott, Shackleton, and Edward Wilson. Names were attached to new geographical features, specimens

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 321

21/12/2016 10:11

322  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica returned for study, and meteorological and other records obtained that established a measure of knowledge over a hitherto unknown space. Equally importantly, the expedition articulated a set of values that resonated with the British imperial ethos. Defined as a British contribution to tackling a challenge posed by nature to all civilized nations, including scientific collections and observations in addition to grueling travel that tested men up to and beyond their limits, the NAE thus inscribed Britain upon the Antarctic ice. Nationalism and science were similarly important to other contemporaneous Antarctic expeditions. Brandon Luedtke has made the important point that the proclamation of Antarctica’s importance at the Geographical Congress of 1895 only received flesh on its bones at the Congress of 1899, which featured concrete discussions of how that task might be accomplished through a series of expeditions.25 The resulting four ventures were coordinated, if not collaborative: it was agreed that the four ‘quadrants’ of the Antarctic should be divided up between the expeditions, in order to maximize the new knowledge acquired. In this sense they conformed neatly to an ethos that Robert Marc Friedman has described eloquently in relation to European science more generally at this time, of science and exploration as fields for civilized competition between nations, with excellence in science a vindication of cultural strength.26 A new farthest south was a potent and readily accessible marker of achievement – one that the British expedition was in prime position to attain, after Markham invoked historical reasons to select the Ross Sea quadrant ­(considerably closer to the geographic Pole). Markham’s vision for Antarctic exploration involved imposing his will over that of the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific body, but also the oceanographer William Speirs Bruce. Despite being born and raised in London, Bruce embraced his Scottish ancestry with an enthusiasm that suggests emotional rather than simply strategic c­ ommitment.27 Accustomed to seeking foreign patronage for his research – he had a particularly good relationship with Prince Albert of Monaco, who sponsored much marine science around the turn of the century – Bruce positioned himself as a distinctly Scottish researcher in distinction to the British geographical establishment associated with Scott and Markham. His 1902–04 Scottish National Antarctic Expedition shared the same flag as the Discovery – but little else. There was no attempt to reach the South Pole, although later in the decade Bruce would attempt to raise funds for another expedition with a continental crossing as its aim.28 The greatest geopolitical legacy of Bruce’s expedition was the meteorological station it established on Laurie Island. At the completion of the expedition Bruce offered the station to the British government. There was little interest from London, and the Argentine government took over the station, sending an annual relief expedition that kept the island permanently occupied. At the time there seemed little reason to maintain the settlement, but in later years it provided Argentina with valuable evidence of continued occupation of (and interest in) the Antarctic region, and provided the basis for a challenge to British claims to sovereignty over the islands surrounding the Antarctic Peninsula.29 The particular function of the station became important too: meteorological data from the far South Atlantic could be linked to improved weather forecasts in Argentina, demonstrating a practical as well as a symbolic engagement that further legitimized Argentina’s conception of the Antarctic Peninsula region as geographically connected to Tierra del Fuego. Two other expeditions visited Antarctic in the years 1901–03. A German expedition led by Erich von Drygalski, and directly associated with the German state, sailed to the region

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 322

21/12/2016 10:11

The politics of early exploration  323 south of the Kerguelen Islands. The name of the ship – the Gauss, after the distinguished mathematician and student of terrestrial magnetism Carl Friedrich Gauss – emphasized the expedition’s location within a tradition of geographical mapping linked to that particular discipline. That purpose was embedded in the ship’s design, which included a metal-­free area to ensure optimal magnetic observation. The Gauss surveyed a length of coastline that was named Kaiser Wilhelm II Land, in addition to discovering and naming the extinct volcano Gaussberg. In doing so the explorers themselves, the scientific tradition to which they belonged, and the nation whose culture they embodied were all inscribed upon Antarctica. The Gauss ultimately failed to reach as far south as its backers had hoped and returned to Germany in November 1903, to a reception that Cornelia Lüdecke has diplomatically described as ‘not overwhelming’.30 The oceanographic, meteorological, biological, and magnetic results of the expedition did not constitute evidence of national achievement in quite the same way as a new farthest south record. Almost simultaneously to Bruce and von Drygalski, a Swedish expedition led by the young geographer Otto Nordenskjöld explored the area around the Antarctic Peninsula. Nordenskjöld’s expedition was located within a longer tradition of Swedish Arctic ­exploration – most notably involving his uncle Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, a geologist who led numerous expeditions to Spitsbergen and led the first ever traverse of the North-­East Passage in 1878–80.31 Prestige was earned less through the acquisition of territory than through research acknowledged as serious and substantive, although as the North-­East Passage traverse made clear, accomplishing feats of travel retained value too. Many initially thought Nordenskjöld to be too young and inexperienced to live up to this ­tradition – a committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences worried that he would sacrifice thoroughness in his haste to be first – but he eventually raised the funds for his expedition.32 Nordenskjöld’s expedition met with near-­fatal disaster when its ship, the Antarctic, was crushed in the ice and sank, leaving three separated exploring parties alone on the continent. Although all expedition members were eventually rescued, the loss of the ship meant more than a threat to life: it also meant the loss of the ship’s cargo – a hull full of seal oil. As Lisbeth Lewander pointed out, the expedition’s leaders (and backers) viewed the Antarctic as a space for commerce as well as science.33 This was part of the reason why an experienced whaling captain, the Norwegian Carl Anton Larsen, commanded the Antarctic – a choice that would play a major role in shaping the economic future of the region.34 Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their existing concerns over Nordenskjöld’s capacity to lead a serious scientific expedition, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences remained skeptical about the hunting plans (for practical as much as moral reasons), a factor that probably contributed to the commercial aspects of the expedition being downplayed. Despite the many scientific observations and collections that the expedition made, including a fine set of fossils, its most enduring legacy was the Antarctic whaling industry that began in earnest in 1904. Larsen’s observations of whale stocks led directly to the establishment of the first Antarctic whaling companies.35 Because whaling companies needed shore stations to process their catches, the legal title to the islands in the Antarctic Peninsula region suddenly became important. This in turn spurred the British government to in 1908 issue ‘letters patent’ affirming sovereignty over the Falkland Islands Dependencies.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 323

21/12/2016 10:11

324  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica In the decade to come, explorers such as Scott rather than whaling captains would continue to be the most recognizable figures when it came to Antarctica. The race to the geographic Pole captured imaginations in Europe and beyond. But for Larsen and his fellow whalers, Antarctica became a place of work, and a source of substantial wealth that was tied to the global markets. For the British government, the Falkland Islands Dependencies became a colonial space to be monitored, administered, measured, and developed – part of Britain’s sprawling global empire. It is essential to recognize that even if Antarctica was an arena for national honor through exploration at the turn of the century, a challenge to civilization the conquest geographers of which could mastermind, the first declaration of sovereignty over the Antarctic continent was directly instigated by a desire to demarcate and control a commercially significant area.

THE RACE TO THE POLE – AND ITS AFTERMATH Exploration and commerce continued to be intertwined in the years leading up to the First World War, even as another dichotomy emerged – one between science and ‘pole-­ hunting’. Lexicographer Bernadette Hince has traced the first usage of this term in relation to the Antarctic to 1907, in a newspaper report of Shackleton’s departure on an expedition that would be ‘not merely’ concerned with reaching the geographic Pole.36 Yet as Aant Elzinga has documented, even as the race to be first to the Pole seized popular imaginations, individuals such as Nordenskjöld and Henryk Arctowski – a veteran of the Belgica expedition – sought to advance the view of Antarctic exploration as a means for nations to advance the greater human good through science.37 The specific organization through which this was to be done, the International Polar Committee (IPC), achieved little. But in the expeditions that formed the remainder of the Heroic Age, Antarctica remained a space where diverse forms of gain could be attained. Shackleton had earlier taken part in the poleward journey on the NAE but had fallen ill with scurvy on the return march, and was invalided back to Britain. The potential for fame and glory through conquering the Pole had nonetheless aroused his attention, and Shackleton duly raised money for his own expedition, which departed in 1907. Private in character, and lacking the driving support of Clements Markham, the expedition nevertheless embodied the values and aspirations of the British Empire. This was particularly true in the case of Australia. Shackleton recruited three geologists from the University of Sydney – T.W. Edgeworth David, Douglas Mawson, and Leo Cotton – who viewed Antarctica as a site for useful fieldwork, ‘to see an ice age in being’ as Mawson put it.38 By participating in the expedition Australia would also demonstrate its commitment to exploring the lands to its south. The logic of demonstrating Australia’s contribution to an imperial challenge resulted in the federal government granting Shackleton a much-­needed £5,000, a decision that was to be replicated again in the mid-­1950s when another British explorer – Sir Vivian Fuchs – received £20,000 from the Australian government for the (Commonwealth) Trans-­Antarctic Expedition (CTAE).39 Shackleton failed to reach the geographic Pole – famously turning around ninety-­seven miles before his destination when he realized that to go any further would be suicidal – but his party became the first humans to venture past the Ross Ice Shelf and up on to the polar plateau. David, Mawson, and Alistair Forbes Mackay reached the South Magnetic

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 324

21/12/2016 10:11

The politics of early exploration  325 Pole in January 1909 and raised the British flag there. Although David later had doubts about Mawson’s magnetic navigation, Antarctic exploration (particularly with a scientific dimension) nevertheless became established in the Australian consciousness as a national strength.40 Shackleton was knighted and temporarily eclipsed Scott as the premier British Antarctic explorer of his day. Although his expedition was privately organized, the claim he laid to the polar plateau in Great Britain’s name would remain significant in years to come, and the place names that feature on Antarctic maps ensure that his presence lingers into the present – including glaciers named for himself and his principal sponsor. Shackleton was not the only Antarctic veteran to return south. The Frenchman Jean-­ Baptiste Charcot returned to Antarctica in 1908, to the same area west of the Antarctic Peninsula that he had explored five years earlier, to complete maps of the region (including the newly named Charcot Land, in honour of his father). But as William A. Hoisington Jr noted, Charcot also saw Antarctic exploration as a more general means of restoring national prestige following a difficult period in French history – including the infamous Dreyfus Affair.41 Charcot’s narrative of the expedition – including his emotional joy at discovering new land, and questionable decision to not tell his crew the truth about the state of their damaged ship – confirmed a sense of commitment to furthering both nation and civilization through challenging the boundaries of knowledge, but also of the French nation and its representatives, his crew. At the same time, Charcot noted with some enthusiasm that the whaling industry was thriving – and expressed the hope that his countrymen would join it.42 Mawson too saw a clear opportunity in Antarctica. The Shackleton expedition had roused political interest in Australia – much of it stimulated by Edgeworth David, who saw in Antarctic exploration an excellent opportunity to promote science to a sport-­ obsessed Australian public (plus ça change?). Diligent and physically strong rather than an intellectually brilliant geologist, Mawson had thrived in Antarctica and recognized that a national Antarctic expedition could be an excellent stepping-­stone to professional advancement. At the same time, the young Australian federation (and its peak scientific body, the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science) conceived of Antarctica as a means of proving its worth to the empire – and to the world at large. The resulting Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE) reflected both the political structure of the state that supported it (with financial contributions from across the Australian state governments, plus New Zealand) and the vision of Mawson, its driving force, to make Australia a leading power in Antarctica. Its staff spent two years on the coast of Adelie Land, the coastline originally discovered by the Frenchman Dumont d’Urville. What exactly did being an Arctic power entail? Mawson was a professional scientist for whom advancement within academia – culminating in a professorship – would be furthered through fieldwork in Antarctica, and the leadership of an expedition designated explicitly as a contribution to science. He backed this up by filling his staff with young scientists who by and large shared his goal. Yet like Charcot, Mawson looked enviously upon the booming whaling industry and the wealth it generated. His articulation of the expedition’s importance to potential donors invoked appeals to civic duty, but also returns on investment, with vivid descriptions of seas ‘infested with seals and oil-­bearing whales’.43 The second cruise of the expedition’s ship, the Aurora, included an observer tasked specifically with spotting and noting whales (the report he produced was unpromising, however, and Mawson did not play it up). In later years Mawson became a propagandist for an

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 325

21/12/2016 10:11

326  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Australian whaling industry. Not only would it be a ‘source of wealth’ for Australians – wealth that by the 1920s seemed to be mainly going to Norway – but it would provide a ‘nursery of hardy seamen’, further building Australian capacity to exploit and administer its Antarctic possessions.44 This concept of the Antarctic as a crucible from which men worthy of building the Empire would emerge holds parallels to Michael Robinson’s observations on Arctic exploration in the public imagination in the United States.45 Mawson’s ambitions for Australian Antarctica went beyond exploiting the resources off its coast. As Brigid Hains has shown, Mawson viewed the lands to Australia’s south as potentially productive colonies.46 Geological prospecting might reveal valuable m ­ inerals – and indeed, Mawson created a brief moment of excitement among the expedition’s members when he claimed to have found emeralds in a quartz reef.47 Mawson evidently recognized his mistake before long, and the rush never eventuated. Nevertheless, Mawson remained convinced that the windswept and barren land could support a range of activities from harvesting penguin eggs to farming Arctic foxes to somehow harnessing the electrical energy produced by the aurora australis.48 The political value of the AAE thus derived from both prestige and productivity. Indeed, while officiating over a ceremony to formally take possession of land near the main base in the name of the British Crown, Mawson made sure to tell his men that French and German expeditions had earlier been unable to land in this harsh place. Mawson always viewed Antarctica as a place for Australia to extract value through labor. Perhaps it is appropriate, therefore, that the best-­known episode from the AAE was not any piece of scientific endeavor but rather Mawson’s staggeringly difficult lone trek to survival following an ill-­fated sledging trip, which cost the lives of his two companions.49 Although the expedition is widely regarded today as a pivotal event in establishing Australian sovereignty over Antarctica (to this day, the 42 percent of the continent contained within the Australian Antarctic Territory constitutes the largest claim by any state), the absence of any economic activity meant that the political value of the AAE would remain largely latent until its achievements – and to a significant extent, its character as an overtly science-­focused venture – would become useful resources in succeeding years. Later writers have frequently lauded the AAE’s devotion to science as a statement of higher intent, helped by the much later consensus that Antarctica ought to be a ‘continent for science’.50 Similar claims have been made regarding Robert Falcon Scott’s famous final expedition (1910–13), organized once again with the backing of the RGS.51 There is a large element of truth in both assertions. Scott, like Mawson, regarded his expedition as a means of revealing Antarctica through a range of scientific investigations. His headline goal was nevertheless to lead the first party to reach the geographic South Pole, whereas Mawson placed greater emphasis on exploring the coast north-­west of Scott’s planned base at McMurdo Sound.52 When Scott sailed south in 1910 he was not aware that the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, veteran of the Belgica expedition and subsequently leader of the first traverse of the North-­West Passage (1903–06), had abandoned his plans to sail north into the Arctic Basin and instead headed south. The drama that Amundsen’s announcement caused had the inevitable effect of placing the two expeditions in a very public race. The geographic North Pole had recently been conquered by the American Robert E. Peary – a claim almost immediately countered by Amundsen’s old Belgica comrade Frederick A. Cook, who asserted that he had reached the Pole a year before – and the controversy between

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 326

21/12/2016 10:11

The politics of early exploration  327 the two men only heightened the sense that ‘pole-­hunting’ was a subject of considerable popular appeal.53 This in turn rendered its participants agents of cultural power, and imbued the Pole with a headline-­grabbing appeal that forced even William Speirs Bruce to include a polar trek in his plans when contemplating future Antarctic expeditions. Nowhere was this truer than in Norway. Fully independent only since 1905, when an unpopular union with Sweden was dissolved, Norway’s status as a nation on a par with others drew authority from a modern tradition of Arctic endeavor that built upon a heritage of polar exploration in the deeper past. Fridtjof Nansen’s completion of the first crossing of Greenland in 1888 provided the most important impetus for this tradition, which included both expeditions (including by Nansen himself) and institutions (such as the Norwegian Geographical Society, founded in 1889 upon Nansen’s return from Greenland) that validated the importance of those expeditions and linked them to the voyages of Norsemen almost a millennium earlier.54 The mode of travel constituted another cultural marker, as cross-­country skiing – the method by which Nansen had crossed Greenland, and by which Amundsen would reach the heart of Antarctica – was also heavily associated with Norwegian identity.55 When Peary appeared to have won the race to the North Pole, the South Pole emerged as an alternative location to articulate that tradition. What the continent lacked in geographical proximity to Norway it made up for with a landscape ripe for an epic ski trip. Millions of words have been devoted to evaluating the merits (or otherwise) of Scott and Amundsen, and to assessing the reasons for their divergent fates. The outline of the story is well known. Scott established his base at McMurdo Sound, whereas Amundsen started out from the Bay of Whales at the eastern side of what was then known as the Great Ice Barrier (and is today known as the Ross Ice Shelf). Scott’s journey to the Pole used a combination of dog-­sleds, ponies, and man-­hauling whereas Amundsen stuck to dog-­sleds – and used skis to a far greater extent than his rivals. Amundsen reached the Pole first, on 14 December 1911, with Scott arriving five weeks later, and successfully returned in time to sail north at the end of that Antarctic summer. Scott and his four companions in the final pole party were never seen alive again. The bodies of the final three survivors – Scott, Edward Wilson, and Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers – were found the following year by a search party. Subsequent writers have noted the unusually harsh weather conditions that Scott faced in the final stages of his journey56 and debated at length his logistical and personnel choices.57 As with all historical episodes, the race between Scott and Amundsen has also become a valuable resource for articulating political goals well after the expeditions had been completed.58 The sovereignty claim that Amundsen made to the area surrounding the South Pole (which he named King Haakon VII’s Plateau) was revived when the borders of Antarctic territorial claims began to be drawn up in the early 1920s, even if it ultimately proved unimportant to the final drawing of boundaries. The character as well as the fact of presence was also politically significant. Jones has described the significant cultural footprint of Scott’s expedition in the immediate aftermath of its survivors returning to Britain – including the mobilization of Scott’s sacrifice and devotion to country during the First World War.59 After the war his memory would be mobilized in support of what would become the Scott Polar Research Institute,60 today a thriving research center attached to Cambridge University. Two other nationally flagged expeditions also visited Antarctica during this period. One

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 327

21/12/2016 10:11

328  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica was a Japanese venture led by Nobu Shirase, whom William Stevenson III has described as a ‘low-­ranking Army reservist’ who succeeded in constructing an expedition that reflected the imperatives deemed most important to Antarctic exploration at the time.61 Stevenson notes that Shirase appealed to both notions of national honor – to participate in the race to the South Pole was to assert Japan’s place within the realm of white civilized nations – but also to demonstrate that Japan could contribute to western science, in a sense also continuing the changes of the Meiji Restoration and its eager embrace of European technology and industry. The problem was that Shirase had neither the depth of knowledge necessary to plan a successful Antarctic expedition nor the access to scientists who might be able to conduct meaningful research there. Neither problem was ever fully solved, and Shirase’s hope of beating Scott to the Pole was never realistic, but his men did succeed in landing in Antarctica and conducting a limited range of observations and inland travels. Having failed in achieving its main goal, the expedition’s scientific leader – Terutaro Takeda – turned to mapping and ice studies as evidences of achievement. Stevenson has noted that neither of Takeda’s main claims (on the insularity of King Edward VII Land and the formation of ice in the Antarctic) stood up to scrutiny, and the latter were almost immediately debunked. Honor was ultimately restored, in Stevenson’s view, through a focus on the amount achieved compared to the lack of resources, time, and expertise that the expedition possessed. Relative rather than absolute measures of success could save face in the short term. Stevenson’s claim that Shirase ‘embodied a pioneering ideal that has continued to inspire explorers and scientists alike’62 perhaps says more about the manner in which even a problematic ancestor can prove useful to later workers seeking to locate themselves within a longer national tradition. The precise content of the expedition eventually became secondary to the fact it had occurred at all. Whereas Shirase joined the many expeditions working in the Ross Sea area, the German Wilhelm Filchner instead traveled to the east of the Antarctic Peninsula in 1911–12 and sought to penetrate the Weddell Sea. Although initially hoping to reach the Pole himself, Filchner’s headline goal ultimately became determining whether Antarctica was split into two components by a channel between the Ross and Weddell Seas.63 National political objectives were again inscribed upon the expedition – its main ship was rechristened the Deutschland for the expedition – but unlike the cases of British, Norwegian, or even Australian Antarctic exploration, Filchner could not lean upon a consensus that Antarctica constituted a peculiarly appropriate field in which his nation could express its strength. The expedition proved something of a fiasco, thanks in large part to what Mills has described as the ‘exceptionally malignant behavior’ of the captain of the Deutschland, Richard Vahsel, who died of complications from syphilis before the voyage was over.64 New areas of coastline named for both expedition members and backers at home (Luitpold Land bore the name of the Bavarian Prince Regent whose patronage had helped get the expedition underway) inscribed the German nation upon Antarctica. But unlike Drygalski almost a decade earlier, Filchner was an afterthought compared to his counterparts from other nations. Like Shirase, Filchner’s legacy was only really revived when Germany made plans to participate in the Antarctic leg of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) nearly a half-­century later. Shackleton’s ill-­fated Imperial Trans-­Antarctic Expedition also traveled toward the Weddell Sea, with the aim of crossing the continent to Ross Island (a supply party was dropped in the latter location to establish depot points along the planned route). The

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 328

21/12/2016 10:11

The politics of early exploration  329 polar crossing was a means of retaining the novelty of the journey in a post-­Scott and Amundsen age. Sailing for Antarctica almost exactly upon the outbreak of the First World War, the expedition faced its own desperate battle for survival when its ship – the Endurance – was crushed in the ice. All members of the main Weddell Sea party successfully made it to Elephant Island, from where Shackleton and two others made an epic journey to South Georgia in an open lifeboat, and then crossed the island to reach the whaling station at Stromness. The rest of the party were eventually rescued from Elephant Island without loss of life – more than could be said for the Ross Sea party, three of whom died before they too were evacuated.65 Unlike Filchner or Shirase, let alone Mawson, Shackleton relied only minimally on science as a means of justifying his expedition: there was talk of observing whale numbers en route, and plans for work on the continent itself, but the feat of travel was the definitive accomplishment. No IGY expedition ever bore his name. The venture that most clearly followed in his tracks – Vivian Fuchs’s CTAE, which completed the route Shackleton had aimed to follow – positioned itself as a contribution to the IGY, but drew more strongly on the association of Shackleton with a spirit of pluck and endeavor.66 Today Shackleton’s name has become an icon of leadership and resourcefulness rather than a precursor to the age of science that has followed.67

CONCLUSION When the First World War ended and Antarctic exploration once again became a topic of conversation, plans emerged for expeditions in the style of those that had come before. Shackleton’s final expedition was the most notable. Another venture – John Cope’s grandly styled British Imperial Antarctic Expedition (which actually had only five p ­ articipants) – collapsed amid debts and disorganization, Cope’s incompetence as striking as his expedition’s irrelevance.68 Many of those debts were owed to the Norwegian whaling magnate Lars Christensen, whose displeasure perhaps played a role in pushing him to sponsor his own series of Antarctic expeditions in the years that followed. Antarctic whaling continued to boom during the 1920s, and with it came a shift in the drivers of Antarctic, toward states and deep-­pocketed capitalists such as Christensen. It is easy to understand why the Heroic Age continues to be venerated in popular memory. The romantic quality to the race for the South Pole and the quest to explore hitherto unvisited lands and seas was absent in the expeditions that followed. But perhaps above all else, the expeditions endured almost unimaginable hardships. Mawson’s solo survival trek, Shackleton’s open boat journey, Nordenskjöld’s miraculous reassembly of three scattered parties, and Scott’s doomed final march have drawn admiration and astonishment in equal measure. These were stark and vivid contests between men and nature – means through which the individual and the nation could do battle with the unknown in the name of monarch and civilization. What did this mean in terms of politics? The nationalism that historians see as ubiquitous in early twentieth-­century Europe was present in spades in Heroic Age expeditions. From Shirase’s concern for maintaining Japan’s image on the global stage to Mawson’s determination to establish Australian identity, Antarctica provided a stage upon which national ambitions and anxieties could be expressed. State support varied from active

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 329

21/12/2016 10:11

330  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica backing to benign tolerance. Expectations of territorial annexations were hardly decisive, even after the boom in whaling around the Antarctic Peninsula led to the annexation of the Falkland Islands Dependencies, which Britain today regards as two overseas ­territories – the British Antarctic Territory, and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (SGSSI). Flags were raised and proclamations made with an eye to honor and glory rather than the prosaic accumulation of territory. These actions nevertheless provided substantial and often quite flexible resources for later political action. As trends in international law developed to permit more generous interpretations of what constituted ‘effective occupation’ in uninhabited lands, acts of even transient occupation assumed legal significance. Moreover, the deeper sense of national accomplishment to which explorers contributed was a rich base upon which later claims to historical legacies could be made – even if individuals such as Shirase, de Gerlache, or Filchner had to be substantially recreated (rather than simply restored) in order to support political projects in later times. With apologies to Winston Churchill, we might say that the end of the Heroic Age was not the end of Antarctic exploration, nor even the beginning of the end. But it was perhaps the end of the beginning.

NOTES   1.   2.   3.   4.

  5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

On this voyage see Wild 1923; Huntford 1985. See for instance Day 2013, 36–7; Bulkeley 2014, 199–203. Philbrick 2003; Maddison 2014. Practically every one of these expeditions produced published first-­hand accounts. See for instance de Gerlache de Gomery 1902; Borchgrevink 1901; Rudmose Brown et al. 1906; Drygalski 1908; Nordenskjöld et al. 1905; Charcot 1906; 1911; Scott 1905; Shackleton 1909; 1919; Amundsen 1912; Mawson 1915; Cherry-­Garrard 1922; Filchner et al. 1994. Seed 1995. See for instance Howkins 2008; Dodds 2002; Collis 2005; Hains 2002. On critical geopolitics, see most notably Toal 1996. Day 2013; Howkins 2015. Among many examples, see Martin 1996; Landis 2001; Dodds 2012. The quote is reproduced in Beaglehole 1992, 431. Jones 1969. Dodds 2012, 25. On Bellingshausen’s expedition and specifically his claims to discovery of the Antarctic continent, see Bulkeley 2014. Reidy 2009. Cawood 1979. Riffenburgh 1993; Robinson 2006. Keltie and Mill 1895. McConville 2007. Houvenaghel 1980, 673. Cabay 2001. Mills 2003, 257. Baughman 1994. Baughman 1999. Markham 1986, 2. Jones 2003, 29. Luedtke 2011. Friedman 1995; 2004. Speak 2003. Speak 2003, 119; Roberts 2011, 16–17. Dodds 2002, 17–18; Howkins 2008, 23–4.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 330

21/12/2016 10:11

The politics of early exploration  331 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

Lüdecke 2007, 456. Wråkberg 1999. Roberts 2011, 14. Lewander 2002. Basberg 2004, 27–8. Hart 2001. Hince 2000, 274. Elzinga 2004. Quoted in Ayres 1999, 12. Dodds 2002, 63. See also Dodds 2005. Roberts 2004. Hoisington Jr 1975, 316. Charcot 1911. Mawson to Biedermann, 18 April 1911, MAC 13 AAE. Mawson, Sydney. Sun. 9 December 1928. Reprinted as a foreword to the prospectus of the Pacific and Ross Sea Whaling Company Limited. The list of directors in the prospectus also included Sir David Orme Masson, who served as president of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science in 1911 and played a pivotal role in supporting Mawson’s expedition. Robinson 2006. Hains 2002. John Hunter, diary entry, 9 March 1912. MS 2806 Papers of John George Hunter, National Library of Australia. Hains 2002, 47–50. Ayres 1999; see also Bickel 1977. For a particularly good example see Fogg 1992, 127. See for instance Preston 1999; Larson 2011. Ayres 1999, 33. Riffenburgh 1993; Robinson 2006. Roberts 2011. Jølle 2011. Solomon 2001. Huntford 1979 and Fiennes 2003 are just two of most prominent among many examples of a tradition that arguably began with Hayes 1928. Roberts 2011. Jones 2003. Roberts 2011. Stevenson 2011, 160. Stevenson 2011, 168. Hornik and Lüdecke 2007, 56. Mills 2003, 229. McElrea and Harrowfield 2011. Dodds 2002. See for instance Morrell and Capparell 2001. Roberts 2011, 55.

REFERENCES Amundsen, R. 1912. The South Pole. London: John Murray. Ayres, P. 1999. Mawson: a life. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Basberg, B. 2004. Whalers, explorers and scientists: historical perspectives on the development of the Antarctic whaling industry. Pages 25–38 in Elzinga, A., Nordin, T., Turner, D., and Wråkberg, U. (eds), Antarctic challenges: historical and current perspectives on Otto Nordenskjöld’s Antarctic expedition 1901–1903. Gothenburg: Royal Society of Arts and Sciences. Baughman, T.H. 1994. Before the heroes came: Antarctica in the 1890s. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Baughman, T.H. 1999. Pilgrims on the ice: Robert Falcon Scott’s first Antarctic expedition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Beaglehole, J.C. 1992. The life of Captain James Cook. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bickel, L. 1977. This accursed land. London: Macmillan.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 331

21/12/2016 10:11

332  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Borchgrevink, C. 1901. First on the Antarctic continent: being an account of the British Antarctic Expedition, 1898–1900. London: George Newnes. Bulkeley, R. 2014. Bellingshausen and the Russian Antarctic Expedition, 1819–1821. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cabay, A. 2001. The funding of the Belgian Antarctic Expedition 1897–1899. Pages 83–92 in Decleir, H. and De Broyer, C. (eds), The Belgica expedition centennial: perspectives on Antarctic science and history. Brussels: VUB Press. Cawood, J. 1979. The magnetic crusade: science and politics in early Victorian Britain. Isis 70(4): 492–518. Charcot, J.B. 1906. Le ‘Français’ au Pôle Sud. Paris: E. Flammarion. Charcot, J.B. 1911. The voyage of the ‘Why Not? in the Antarctic: the journal of the Second French Antarctic Expedition 1908–1910. London and New York: Hodder and Stoughton. Cherry-­Garrard, A. 1922. The worst journey in the world: Antarctic, 1910–1913. London: Constable and Co. Collis, C. 2005. The Proclamation Island moment: making Antarctica Australian. In Carter, D. and Crotty, M. (eds), Australian Studies Centre 25th Anniversary Collection. Brisbane: University of Queensland. Day, D. 2013. Antarctica: a biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Gerlache de Gomery, A. 1902. Quinze mois dans l’Antarctique: voyage de la ‘Belgica’. Brussels: Bulens. Dodds, K. 2002. Pink ice: Britain and the South Atlantic empire. London: I.B. Tauris. Dodds K. 2005. The great trek: New Zealand and the British/Commonwealth 1955–58 Trans-­ Antarctic Expedition. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 33(1): 93–114. Dodds, K. 2012. Antarctica: a very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Drygalski, E. 1908. Deutsche Südpolar-­Expedition, 1901–1903. Berlin: G. Reimer. Elzinga, A. 2004. Otto Nordenskjöld’s quest to internationalize South-­Polar research. Pages 262–90 in Elzinga, A., Nordin, T., Turner, D., and Wråkberg, U. Antarctic challenges: historical and current perspectives on Otto Nordenskjöld’s Antarctic expedition 1901–1903. Gothenburg: Royal Society of Arts and Sciences. Fiennes, R. 2003. Captain Scott. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Filchner, W., Kling, A., Pryzybyllok, E., and Barr, W. 1994. To the sixth continent: the second German Antarctic Expedition. Bluntisham: Bluntisham Books. Fogg, G.E. 1992. A history of Antarctic science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedman, R.M. 1995. Civilization and national honor: the rise of Norwegian geophysical and cosmic science. Pages 3–39 in Collett, J.P. (ed.), Making sense of space: a history of Norwegian space activities. Oslo: Scandinavian Universities Press. Friedman, R.M. 2004. Nansenismen. Pages 107–74 in Drivenes, E.-­A. and Jølle, H.D. (eds), Norsk polarhistorie 2: vitenskapene. Oslo: Gyldendal. Hains, B. 2002. The ice and the inland: Mawson, Flynn, and the myth of the frontier. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Hart, I.B. 2001. Pesca: the history of Compañia Argentina de Pesca Sociedad Anónima of Buenos Aries. An account of the pioneer modern whaling and sealing company in the Antarctic. Aidan Ellis. Hayes, J.G. 1928. Antarctica: a treatise on the southern continent. London: Richards. Hince, B. 2000. The Antarctic dictionary: a complete guide to Antarctic English. Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing. Hornik, H. and Lüdecke, C. 2007. Wilhelm Filchner and Antarctic. Reports on Polar and Marine Research 560: 52–63. Houvenaghel, G. 1980. Belgium and the early development of modern oceanography, including a note on A.F.  Renard. Pages 667–81 in Sears, M. and Merriman, D. (eds), Oceanography: the past. New York, Heidelberg and Berlin: Springer. Howkins, A. 2008. Frozen empires: a history of the Antarctic sovereignty dispute between Britain, Argentina, and Chile, 1939–1959. Proquest LLC, Ann Arbor. Huntford, R. 1979. Scott and Amundsen. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Huntford, R. 1985. Shackleton. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Jølle, H.D. 2011. Nansen: oppdageren. Oslo: Gyldendal. Jones, A.G.E. 1969. New light on John Balleny. Geographical Journal 135 (1): 55–60. Jones, M. 2003. The last great quest: Captain Scott’s Antarctic sacrifice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keltie, J.S. and Mill, H.R. 1896. Report of the Sixth International Geographical Congress held in London, 1895. London: William Clowes and Sons. Landis, M.J. 2001. Antarctica: exploring the extreme. 400 years of adventure. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Larson, E.J. 2011. An empire of ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the heroic age of Antarctic science. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lewander, L. 2002. The representations of the Swedish Antarctic Expedition, 1901–1903. Polar Record 38: 97–114. Lüdecke, C. 2007. German south polar (Gauss) expedition (1901–1903). Pages 455–6 in Riffenburgh, B. (ed.) Encyclopedia of the Antarctic (volume 1). New York: Routledge.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 332

21/12/2016 10:11

The politics of early exploration  333 Luedtke, B. 2011. Dividing Antarctica: the work of the Seventh International Geographical Congress in Berlin 1899. Polarforschung 80(3): 173–80. Maddison, B. 2014. Class and colonialism in Antarctic exploration 1750–1920. London: Pickering and Chatto. Markham, C. 1986. Antarctic obsession: a personal narrative of the origins of the British Antarctic Expedition, 1901–1904. Alburgh: Bluntisham Books. Martin, S. 1996. A history of Antarctica. Sydney: State Library of New South Wales Press. Mawson, D. 1915. The home of the blizzard: being the story of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911–1914. London: William Heinemann. McConville, A. 2007. Henrik Bull, the Antarctic Exploration Committee and the first landing on the Antarctic continent. Polar Record 43(2): 143–53. McElrea, R. and Harrowfield, D.L. 2004. Polar castaways: the Ross Sea Party (1914–17) of Sir Ernest Shackleton. Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press. Mills, W.J. 2003. ‘De Gerlache, Adrien’. In Mill, Exploring polar frontiers: a historical encyclopedia (volume 1). Santa Barbara (CA): ABC CLIO. Mills, W.J. 2003. Filchner, Wilhelm. Pages 228–30 in Mill, Exploring polar frontiers: a historical encyclopedia (volume 1). Santa Barbara (CA): ABC CLIO. Morrell, M. and Capparell, S. 2001. Shackleton’s way: leadership lessons from the great Antarctic explorer. New York: Viking. Nordenskjöld, O., Andersson, J.G., Skottsberg, C.J.F., and Larsen, C.A. 1905. Antarctica, or, two years amongst the ice of the South Pole. London: Hurst and Blackett. Philbrick, N. 2003. Sea of glory: America’s voyage of discovery: the US Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842. New York: Viking. Preston, D. 1999. A first rate tragedy: Robert Falcon Scott and the race to the south pole. London: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Reidy, M. 2009. Tides of history: ocean science and Her Majesty’s Navy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Riffenburgh, B. 1993. The myth of the explorer: the press, sensationalism, and geographical discovery. London: Belhaven. Robinson, M. 2006. The coldest crucible: Arctic exploration and American culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rudmose Brown, R.N., Mossman, R.C., Harvey Pirie, J.H., and Bruce, W.S. 1906. The voyage of the ‘Scotia’, being the record of a voyage in Antarctic seas. London: W. Blackwood and Sons. Scott, R.F. 1905. The voyage of the ‘Discovery’. London: Smith, Elder and Co. Shackleton, E. 1909. The heart of the Antarctic: being the story of the British Antarctic Expedition 1907–1909. London: William Heinemann. Shackleton, E. 1919. South: the story of Shackleton’s last expedition. London: William Heinemann. Solomon, S. 2001. The coldest March: Scott’s fatal Antarctic expedition. New Haven: Yale University Press. Speak, P. 2003. William Speirs Bruce: polar explorer and Scottish nationalist. Edinburgh: National Museum of Scotland Publishing. Stevenson, W.R. III. 2011. Science, the South Pole and the Japanese expedition of 1910–1912. Endeavour 35(4): 160–8. Toal, G. 1996. Critical geopolitics: the politics of writing global space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wild, F., and Macklin, A.H. 1923. Shackleton’s last voyage: the story of the ‘Quest’. London and New York: Cassell.

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 333

21/12/2016 10:11

M4137-DODDS_Part 1 & 2.indd 334

21/12/2016 10:11

PART III REGULATING ANTARCTICA

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 335

21/12/2016 10:10

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 336

21/12/2016 10:10

22.  Politics and environmental regulation in Antarctica: a historical perspective Adrian Howkins

For a few weeks during most summers, a melt-­water stream runs off the Canada Glacier in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys, crosses a half-­mile or so of rocky terrain and flows into the ice-­covered Lake Fryxell in the valley floor. For the past half-­century, the McMurdo Dry Valleys have been a center of scientific research in the Antarctic Continent.1 Canada Stream is of particular interest to ecologists as a result of the relative abundance there of algal mats, which provide a fascinating example of life in an extreme environment. At the first contact with liquid water, mats that have spent the winter in a dessicated state rehydrate and live out their annual life cycle in the abundant sunlight of a few summer weeks. By taking physical measurements of the stream over time and by measuring the size and composition of algal mat communities, ecologists can ask ­important questions about ecosystem response to a changing physical environment. In 1985, members of the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) approved a proposal to designate Canada Glacier as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).2 This afforded special protection to a site that was seen both as fragile and of particular scientific value. In 2002, under the new arrangements of the Madrid Environmental Protocol, Canada Glacier was redesignated as an Antarctic Specially Protected Area (ASPA) number 131, along with three other sites in the McMurdo Dry Valleys: Barwick and Balham Valleys (123), Linnaeus Terrace (138), and Botany Bay (154). Two years later, in 2004, the whole of the McMurdo Dry Valleys Region was declared as an Antarctic Specially Managed Area (ASMA) following a joint proposal by the United States and New Zealand.3 Under these provisions, special training has been required for all scientists, logistics staff, and visitors going to the Dry Valleys, and a permit is required for anyone to enter the boundaries of the Canada Glacier ASPA to be issued by the national program with which the entrant is associated. Almost without exception, scientific researchers are the only people allowed anywhere close to Canada Stream: helicopters are not permitted to land within the ASPA boundaries, camping is forbidden, and disturbance is kept to an absolute minimum. As a result of these regulations, the area within the Canada Stream ASPA is one of the most formally protected places on a continent known for its environmental protection. The McMurdo Dry Valleys are currently one of six ASMAs across Antarctica, and Canada Glacier is part of a network of seventy-­two ASPAs.4 Many of these sites are located in regions of high tourist visitation, especially in the Antarctic Peninsula area; others are located in areas of intense scientific research such as the McMurdo Dry Valleys. The Committee for Environmental Protection (CEP) manages the network of ASMAs, ASPAs, and other protected areas within the political framework of the ATS. Although certainly not functioning as a traditional state system, the environmental measures instituted by the ATS fit neatly into what environmental historians have characterized as the ‘environmental management state’, through which governments 337

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 337

21/12/2016 10:10

338  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica institute far-­reaching protection measures in an effort to control people and the natural environment.5 Environmental protection policies offer a convenient way for members of the ATS to demonstrate their political control of the continent to a variety of audiences. For domestic constituencies, these measures suggest an active interest in the Antarctic continent in order to justify funds and effort. Within the ATS, the implementation of environmental protection measures offers a convenient way of demonstrating engagement with the continent. For the broader international community, a focus on environmental protection measures looks like a very benign activity, however ‘exclusive’ the ATS may be thought to be. The relationship between science, politics, and the environment has been a popular topic for the social science and humanities scholars who have studied Antarctica.6 In Governing the Frozen Commons (1998), Christopher Joyner examined the centrality of environmental protection to the development of the Antarctic regime, and a number of other scholars have investigated this theme.7 But despite this interest, much of the debate about ASMAs, ASPAs, and other protected areas continues to take place at a largely bureaucratic level between program managers, scientists, and environmentalists, with little attention paid to the historical and geopolitical context in which these measures developed. These discussions tend to be largely future orientated, and correspond with what Jessica O’Reilly has called Antarctica’s ‘technocratic wilderness’.8 Recent calls for a bioregional approach to conservation in Antarctica, for example, while certainly paying some attention to political context, stop short of a thorough analysis of how the existing system of protected areas has developed over time.9 Environmental historians have long since recognized that histories of national parks and protected areas offer good opportunities for thinking about changing human-­nature relations over time. This chapter suggests that scholars interested in the politics of the Antarctic continent have much to learn from thinking about the history of protected areas in Antarctica and beyond. A historical perspective raises a number of questions that might get ignored if the focus is simply on the present and future. What are the origins of environmental regulation in Antarctica? How is environmental regulation connected to the wider geopolitics of the southern continent? What have been the consequences of this regulation, both for the Antarctic environment itself and for the ways we understand the politics of the southern continent? Taken together, an attempt to address these questions expands the debate about environmental regulation in Antarctica and offers insights into the broader relationship between science, politics, and the environment. In many ways, this history offers an example of how science and environmental protection have functioned as a restraining influence on the contested politics of Antarctica by offering a peaceful outlet for national competition. In turn, by asking these questions, historians have much to contribute to ongoing discussions about which areas of Antarctica should be formally protected. This could be of particular value as discussions about environmental protection call for large additions to the protected area system, both on land and in the surrounding oceans in the form of marine protected areas.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 338

21/12/2016 10:10

Politics and environmental regulation  339

THE ORIGINS OF ANTARCTIC ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION Within much of the Antarctic community, there is a sense that environmental regulation is a relatively new phenomenon. In what might be thought of as the dominant narrative of recent Antarctic history, the political bickering and greed of the minerals negotiations of the 1980s gave way to a much more enlightened approach to the Antarctic environment with the signature of the Madrid Environmental Protocol in 1991 and its ratification seven years later. In a recent article on the effectiveness of environmental non-­governmental organizations (ENGOs) in Antarctica, for example, the scholar and environmental campaigner Tina Tin uses the word ‘prehistoric’ to refer to the state of environmental regulations in Antarctica in the period before the signing of the Protocol.10 While there is perhaps an element of irony to Tin’s use of this label, it is consistent with the future-­oriented focus of many Antarctic policy-­makers and environmentalists. In the effort to preserve Antarctica’s future, there is little perceived need for engaging with a complex and, at times, contradictory past. A historical approach to the question of environmental regulation in Antarctica immediately functions to extend the chronology of attempts to protect the Antarctic environment. Academic disputes over origins are rarely particularly interesting, and quickly descend into debates over semantics. The question of who was the first Antarctic environmentalist, for example, has little to contribute to a serious historical analysis. It is important, however, to acknowledge a longer history of attempts to control and regulate the Antarctic environment in order to put contemporary debates into a wider context. A long-­term perspective also allows for an appreciation of broad trends in the environmental history of Antarctica. The last one hundred years, for example, have witnessed major changes in perceptions of the southern continent, from impenetrable wasteland to fragile wilderness. A case could be made that – for some people at least – thoughts turned to environmental regulation almost as soon as the Antarctic continent had been officially sighted in the early nineteenth century. Appalled by the wastefulness and barbarity of the Antarctic sealing industry, the Russian scientific explorer Thaddeus von Bellingshausen noted in January 1821: ‘As other sealers also were competing in the destruction of the [fur] seals there could be no doubt that round the South Shetland Islands just as at South Georgia  . . . the number of these sea animals will rapidly decrease.’11 Britain’s James Weddell, himself working as a sealer, decried the profligacy of the industry.12 An awareness of environmental destruction, however, did not stop Weddell from hunting seals, nor did it stimulate the imposition of environmental regulation from outside. The Antarctic continent during this period was a classic terra nullius, a land belonging to nobody, and no country showed much interest in stepping up to make claims. It was the economics of the sealing industry, rather than external regulation, that limited Antarctic sealing, with devastating consequences for Antarctic fur seals and elephant seals.13 For much of the rest of the nineteenth century there was relatively little activity around the Antarctic continent, and almost no discussion of environmental regulation. But as soon as countries began taking an interest in Antarctic sovereignty the question of how to regulate the Antarctic environment was back on the table. Stimulated by the rapid growth of the whaling industry on the island of South Georgia, Great Britain made a sovereignty

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 339

21/12/2016 10:10

340  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica claim for the Antarctic Peninsula region in 1908 as the Falkland Islands Dependencies. In order to justify this claim, British officials sought to demonstrate that British ownership held out the potential of understanding and regulating the Antarctic environment ‘for the good of humanity.’ Such an approach resonated with similar strategies throughout the British Empire, which have been labeled as a form of ‘environmental authority.’14 As part of their assertion of environmental authority, British officials sought to highlight what environmental historians label ‘declensionist narratives’ of degradation of the natural world. In the case of the Falkland Islands Dependencies, the British focused on the rapid decline of Antarctic seal populations at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which drew upon what Garrett Hardin would later call ‘the tragedy of the commons.’15 Without effective authority, British officials argued, there was a danger that the Antarctic whaling industry, and what remained of its sealing one, would repeat the early history of sealing.16 According to British officials such as William Allardyce, the Governor of the Falkland Islands from 1904 to 1915, Britain’s claim to the Falkland Islands Dependencies was a way of ensuring this would not happen; an unthinkable future would be deferred and possibly stopped by such an intervention. The most high-­profile project to demonstrate British environmental authority in the Falkland Islands Dependencies was a series of oceanographic studies known as the Discovery Investigations. As recent studies by Peder Roberts and D. Graham Burnett have demonstrated, this research sought to produce useful environmental knowledge that could be used to help regulate the Antarctic whaling industry in a sustainable manner.17 Unfortunately for British assertions of environmental authority, the advent of pelagic whaling from the late 1920s onwards put the whaling industry largely outside the control of British regulation, and resulted in a fairly rapid decline in whale populations. During the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, South American ‘environmental nationalism’ in Antarctica had a less explicit focus on environmental regulation than British environmental authority.18 But implicit in the cases made by Argentina and Chile for sovereignty over the Antarctic Peninsula was the idea that the region belonged to them as a result of proximity and shared geographical characteristics. This in turn implied a deep connection with Antarctic territory, which was fostered by the media in both countries.19 Antarctic thinkers such as Hernán Pujato in Argentina and Enrique Cordovez in Chile certainly discussed the idea of exploiting the Antarctic environment for the benefit of their respective countries.20 But the dominant ‘emotion’ during this period of South American Antarctic history was a sense of nationalism and ownership, which could create a strong emotional bond with the Antarctic environment. This ‘passion for Antarctica’ offers a reminder that there are different paradigms for thinking about and regulating the Antarctic environment, not all of which fit into commonly held notions of the meaning of environmentalism in the English-­speaking world.21 A South American environmental consciousness would be highlighted during the Antarctic Treaty negotiations in 1959 when Argentina led the campaign to prohibit nuclear explosions in the southern continent, ostensibly out of the concern that these activities might contaminate their territory.22 The territorial dispute in the Antarctic Peninsula region between Argentina, Britain, and Chile was partially put on hold by the signing of the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, along with other territorial issues in the Antarctic continent. The exact nature of the connection between the Antarctic Treaty and the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–58 has been much debated.23 But one widely accepted consequence of this relationship is

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 340

21/12/2016 10:10

Politics and environmental regulation  341 that it brought science into the heart of the developing ATS. In the words of Chris Joyner and others, science became the currency of Antarctic politics. Interestingly, the Antarctic Treaty made almost no mention of traditional environmental protection measures, such as the conservation of flora and fauna or the creation of formally protected areas. While this perhaps highlights prevailing attitudes towards the environment in the late 1950s, the unwillingness to discuss such measures also demonstrates the connection between environmental regulation and politics, since these might have destabilized the negotiations by emphasizing questions of sovereignty and legal jurisdiction. Despite the lack of an explicit discussion of environmental regulation in the text of the Antarctic Treaty, this became one of the first things to be discussed at the first Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting (ATCM), held in Canberra in 1961.24 With questions of sovereignty and legal jurisdiction at least temporarily taken care of by the Treaty, the protection of Antarctica’s environment became a relatively safe subject to discuss. The diaries of the British polar expert Brian Roberts at the Scott Polar Research Institute provide some fascinating insights into the connection between environmental regulation and political power, at the same time as revealing that protecting the natural environment was not at the top of everybody’s agenda. In a meeting at the start of the Canberra ATCM Roberts explained how he wanted to use conservation to test the political ‘mood’ of the new Treaty: . . . I want to experiment with the idea of initiating a series of Conventions to regulate Antarctic affairs. To make some beginning with a concerted procedure for dealing with legislative matters seems to me to be more important than any immediate practical needs of conservation. This is a good subject to start with because the basic idea of wild life protection is not controversial.25

In Roberts’ mind, conservation offered a useful tool for his wider political objectives rather than being an end in itself. While everyone did not necessarily share such a cynical view of conservation, Alessandro Antonello makes a strong case that there was nothing inevitable about the embrace of environmentalist policies by the consultative members of the Antarctic Treaty.26 Despite these somewhat inauspicious beginnings, environmental regulation quickly became an important dimension to the discussions within the Antarctic Treaty meetings. The Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctica fauna and flora were adopted in 1964; the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals was signed in 1972; and in 1982 the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) became part of the Antarctic Treaty System. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Antarctic Treaty parties began to discuss the question of mineral exploitation in Antarctica, another subject not mentioned in the Antarctic Treaty. Although viewed with alarm by many environmental organizations, the minerals discussions can be seen as part of the broader agenda to protect and regulate the Antarctic environment along the lines of a utilitarian conservationism. Antarctic Treaty members sought to deal with the question of mineral resources before they became a problem. Such a preemptive approach was in keeping with the wider regulatory framework of the ATS, which sought to promote peace and science in the Antarctic continent. Although the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities (CRAMRA) was opened for signature in 1988, its prospects received a major blow in 1989 when Australia and France refused to sign the convention, and when New Zealand

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 341

21/12/2016 10:10

342  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica s­ ubsequently refused to ratify it. In place of CRAMRA, the Antarctic Treaty parties negotiated an Environmental Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty in Madrid in 1991. The Madrid Protocol, as it is often commonly termed, brought about the beginning of the modern era of Antarctic environmental regulation. Several scholars have examined the collapse of the CRAMRA negotiations and the origins of the Madrid Environmental Protocol, and there are several competing narratives about the causes of contemporary environmental regulation in Antarctica.27 Environmentalists such as Tina Tin have argued that ENGOs have been ‘indispensible’ in pushing an environmental agenda within the Antarctic Treaty System.28 Scientists often make the case that as the results of their research the fragility of the environment is revealed, so they begin to put in place measures to protect it.29 Slightly more cynically, a case could be made that when the Antarctic Treaty powers realized they had little to gain in the short-­to-­medium term from the exploitation of mineral resources, they decided to diffuse international political tensions and criticism of the ATS by putting in place environmental regulations, while ensuring that these would not be permanent and that get-­out clauses were in place.30 Whatever the exact nature of the motivations for the signature of the Madrid Environmental Protocol, it is a truly remarkable document. It has created an innovative environmental protection regime along preservationist lines that has the backing of every member of the ATS. Its headline-­grabbing prohibition of mining and drilling for a period of at least fifty years (Article 7) is unprecedented on such a scale anywhere in the world, even if there are several loopholes – such as the difficulty of differentiating ‘scientific’ mineral activities from other mineral activities – which could potentially reduce its effectiveness. Other parts of the protocol are similarly radical, if a little less dramatic. In no other part of the world are all non-­native species with the exception of humans banned from an entire continent. Through the Committee on Environmental Protection (CEP), the Madrid Environmental Protocol puts in place the framework for the contemporary regulation of the Antarctic environment.

THE POLITICS OF CONTEMPORARY ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION IN ANTARCTICA Throughout the Antarctic summer, an American flag flies over the US Lake Hoare field camp in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. There is nothing particularly showy about the flag and few of the scientists or logistics staff working there would likely give it a second thought. In many ways it fits into a banal nationalism in which Americans are often habituated from an early age.31 But the flag functions as an important statement of US policy in Antarctica. The Dry Valleys are located within the Antarctic territory claimed by New Zealand as the Ross Dependency. The United States refuses to recognize any Antarctic sovereignty claims, including that of New Zealand, and instead reserves its rights to the entire continent. Despite this political rivalry, scientists from both countries have played central roles in conducting research in the region.32 The scientific collaboration in the McMurdo Dry Valleys often goes much further than the data exchange and reporting mandated by the Antarctic Treaty, with shared logistical support, joint scientific meetings, the frequent exchange of scientific personnel, and the development of close friendships. Lake Hoare field camp is a symbol of both the competitive and the ­cooperative nature

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 342

21/12/2016 10:10

Politics and environmental regulation  343 of the US–New Zealand relationship in Antarctica, as it has existed since the IGY of the late 1950s. As an important stage for the US–New Zealand relationship, the recent history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys offers a good place for thinking about how the broader political context of the ATS shapes environmental regulation in Antarctica as a whole. While the history of this ice-­free region is unique in many ways, it is also representative of broader environmental–political trends across the continent. Many of the motivations for ­environmental protection on a local or regional scale mirror those that led to the creation of the Madrid Environmental Protocol, with the difference that the focus is largely for internal consumption within the ATS rather than for an external audience. Pressure for environmental protection within the McMurdo Dry Valleys has come from scientists, environmentalists, and national program managers working within a wider political context. Just as with the origins of the protocol, it is very difficult to disentangle the various causes of environmental regulation in the region, and a strong case can be made that scientific, environmental, and diplomatic factors have all played important roles – often complementary, but sometimes competing – in creating the contemporary regulatory system in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. A large part of the stimulus for creating the McMurdo Dry Valleys ASMA came from scientists working in the region. The more scientists learned about the environment of this region, the more they realized that scientific research could alter the environment.33 As it was recognized that the region’s soils contained microscopic organisms, for example, there was a growing awareness that human trampling could disturb these miniature ecosystems.34 During the 1990s and early 2000s scientists from New Zealand, the United States, and a couple of other interested nations held a series of meetings to discuss how best to protect the McMurdo Dry Valleys environment. The result was the proposal of an ASMA for the region, which was approved at the ATCM in 2004. Another catalyst for the creation of the McMurdo Dry Valleys ASMA was pressure from environmental organizations, especially Greenpeace.35 Although much of the Greenpeace effort in the Ross Sea region focused on environmental practices at the sprawling McMurdo Station, a Greenpeace team visited the Dry Valleys to examine the environmental impacts of scientific research.36 Much of the environmentalists’ concern in this part of the continent focused on the question of wilderness: should there be permanent or even semi-­permanent structures in such a remote and pristine location? Perhaps mirroring a wider environmental concern about the damming and ‘improving’ of rivers, some environmentalists challenged the construction of permanent stream gauges in the Dry Valleys, which were used by hydrologists to measure stream flow. An emphasis on wilderness values sometimes put environmentalists into conflict with scientists. Did the utility of the data collected by stream gauges, for example, justify leaving a permanent human trace in the Dry Valleys? Scientists would generally say yes; environmentalists would generally say no. Despite these tensions, however, there was a broad sense that most scientists and most environmentalists were in agreement about the need for environmental protection in the Dry Valleys. At a national level, it is difficult to know the exact nature of the political motivations of environmental managers when making proposals for protected areas. Proposals to create protected areas, and then the ensuing management of these places, offers states (both claimants and non-­claimants) an opportunity to behave like de facto sovereigns

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 343

21/12/2016 10:10

344  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica by taking a lead in protecting the environment. In a recent article in The Polar Journal, former Russian diplomat V.V. Lukin suggests: ‘it is hard to escape a conclusion that the use of the mechanism of ASPAs and ASMAs is a peculiar mechanism of expansion of their territorial claims in Antarctica’.37 While the situation in the McMurdo Dry Valleys is perhaps not quite this explicit, there is a clear sense that neither New Zealand nor the United States wanted to be left behind as the other country took a lead in proposing environmental protection measures of the McMurdo Dry Valleys. It is interesting to note that two of the ASPAs were proposed by New Zealand and two by the United States, while the 2004 ASMA was a joint proposal. In much the same way that scientists working in the McMurdo Dry Valleys tend to share a common agenda that transcends political differences, the question of tourism functions as something of a ‘common enemy’ that unites the various national programs working in the region. According to IAATO statistics, tourism began in the McMurdo Dry Valleys in the 1992–93 summer season, with helicopters transporting passengers from expedition cruise ships in the Ross Sea into the ice-­free region. An uneasy compromise quickly developed that made an area close to the Canada Glacier the single ‘tourist zone’ (now renamed ‘visitor zone’), the one place in the valleys where tourists could visit. Although the tourist zone is on the opposite side of Lake Fryxell from the Canada Glacier ASPA, there is still concern among scientists that tourist visits might trample soils and interfere with research. The dynamics that led to the creation of the McMurdo Dry Valleys ASMA are similar to those behind the creation of other protected areas around the Antarctic continent. Each ASMA and ASPA has its own unique history, but the creation of each has been influenced by a combination of scientific, environmental, and political factors. Most ASMAs and ASPAs have proved to be relatively uncontroversial, in part because discussions have rarely moved beyond the narrow and technocratic language internal to the ATS. Others – such as the Deception Island ASMA – are more politically charged as a result of the contested politics of the Antarctic Peninsula Region and the high tourist visitation.38 But across the continent, the creation and management of protected areas can be seen as the ‘business as usual’ approach of the ATS, putting in place the measures that allows the ATS to make claims that it is protecting the Antarctic environment, which have resonance at an international political level.

THE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION A historical perspective on the relationship between politics and the Antarctic environment allows for a discussion of consequences as well as causes. Given the close connections between environmental regulation and politics in the history of Antarctica, it is legitimate to ask how the environmental regulations implemented since the signing of the Madrid Environmental Protocol in 1991 have shaped the politics of the continent. This question can then be broken into two parts. Firstly, what are the external consequences of Antarctica’s ‘environmental turn’ in relation to the ATS’s relationship with the rest of the world? Secondly, what are the internal consequences in relation to the relative balance of power within the ATS? The two elements of this question connect together quite strongly,

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 344

21/12/2016 10:10

Politics and environmental regulation  345 in that discussions over protected areas help countries to jockey for position within the ATS, without attracting the attention of the rest of the world. The first of these questions is relatively straightforward to answer. Since the ratification of the Madrid Protocol in 1998, criticism of the ATS has declined markedly, and it is not difficult to make the case that the ATS has been effective in using environmental regulation to support its political agenda. In the 1980s Malaysia led a campaign to have responsibility for Antarctica transferred from the ATS to the United Nations.39 One of the arguments made by Malaysia was that the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties were not doing enough to protect the environment.40 By moving away from the negotiation of a minerals regime for Antarctica towards the Madrid Protocol, the Antarctic Treaty members did much to diffuse criticism that they were ‘carving up’ the economic resources of Antarctica among themselves to the detriment of non-­members. A defense used by several members of the Antarctic Treaty against Malaysia during the United Nations debates was that membership conferred ‘responsibilities not rights’.41 The signing and ratification of the Madrid Protocol made this claim look a lot more legitimate. A significantly increased emphasis on the threat of climate change since the signing of the Madrid Protocol has also focused attention around a common goal and strengthened the claim of the members of the ATS that they are ‘acting in the interests of humanity.’42 The transition from the minerals negotiations of the 1980s to the 1991 Madrid Protocol also did much to assuage environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and the Antarctic and Southern Oceans Coalition (ASOC). A central goal of the environmentalist campaign against the minerals negotiations was the creation of Antarctica as a World Park. While the self-­proclaimed ‘natural reserve dedicated to peace and science’ created by the Protocol did not quite go as far as creating a permanent protected area in Antarctica, environmental organizations generally viewed it as an extremely positive outcome, especially alongside the possible alternatives. Whereas environmentalists had been some of the most strident critics of the minerals negotiations during the 1980s, following the signing and ratification of the Antarctic Treaty they increasingly found themselves moving onto the inside of this system. Environmental organizations began to attend the ATCMs as observers, and environmental managers with strong environmentalist sympathies obtained positions in the CEP. While remaining critical of some aspects of the ATS – especially the perceived lack of permanence of the Madrid Protocol – Greenpeace, ASOC, and other environmental organizations have markedly scaled back their criticism, and this in turn has strengthened the political position of the ATS. One interest group that does not always see eye to eye with the environmental politics of the ATS is the Antarctic tourism industry, most of which is represented by the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators (IAATO). Although public statements from IAATO criticizing the environmental regulations of the ATS are rare, informally there are instances when environmental regulation is seen as too restrictive, focusing on the wrong areas, or unfair, with one rule for tourism operators and another rule for scientists in national programs.43 The current emphasis on Antarctica as a ‘continent for science’ implicitly challenges the legitimacy of other non-­scientific activities on the continent, including tourism. Such differences of opinion, however, should not be overstressed since it is very much in the interests of Antarctic tour operators to preserve the Antarctic environment to maintain the ‘last wilderness’ attraction of their products.44 IAATO is a designated observer at ATS consultative meetings, and although there might

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 345

21/12/2016 10:10

346  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica be disagreement on the specifics of environmental protection, most tour operators are in broad agreement with the need for the ATS to take a lead in protecting the Antarctic environment. At the same time, for a number of ATS consultative parties, tourism serves useful political functions such as reinforcing the importance of Antarctic ‘gateway’ cities such as Punta Arenas and Ushuaia. Since these political functions are similar to those accrued by supporting environmental protection measures, there is often a balancing act in play that prevents conservation measures from being too restrictive. Within the ATS, it is a little more difficult to assess the political consequences of environmental regulation. Much current political interest in Antarctica might be described as what Klaus Dodds has referred to as ‘sovereignty watch’ in relation to protecting supposed rights to territorial claims and natural resources.45 The proposal and management of protected areas undoubtedly plays a role in this jockeying for position. In a recent article in Polar Research David Walton and John Dudeney examine the number of position papers submitted by various ATS members to be discussed at consultative meetings.46 They argue that by demonstrating an active interest in the management of Antarctica, the submission of position papers strengthens the political position of those countries. This argument can easily be extended into the politics of protected areas, and it is not difficult to make the case put forward by V.V. Lukin, among others, that the promotion of environmental protection measures offers a way of acting like de facto sovereigns.47 Within the ATS as it exists today, there may not be an obvious immediate advantage of acting like a sovereign, but more broadly the performance of sovereignty has tremendous power to generate affect among a variety of audiences. This in turn conveys power to shape political debates about the southern continent, even when these debates are not explicitly political. Within a broadly defined Antarctic Community, consisting largely of policymakers, scientists, national program managers, and environmentalists, there is currently a strong movement calling for a change to the way the environment is protected.48 Led by scientists and environmental managers in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain, critics of the current system of protected areas suggest that this has developed in a piecemeal fashion, that it fails to protect entire ecosystem types, and that it simply does not protect a large enough area of the continent. Using colorful GIS generated maps of the continent they show that environmental protection is concentrated on a handful of distinct biomes, and that other bioregions are entirely unprotected. The implications of these criticisms are clear: the current system of environmental regulation is not working, and needs to be replaced with a far more comprehensive system. It is too early to know how these calls for a bioregional approach to Antarctic conservation will play out. But there is still an important function for historians to play in these debates. On the one hand, the historical record over the past twenty-­five years provides ‘data’ for assessing the effectiveness of existing environmental regulation. By bringing this information to the table and participating in these discussions, historians have a valuable role to play in assessing the effectiveness of the current environmental protection regime. At the same time, historians would be the first to say that just because a system has worked in the past does not mean that it will work in the future. As the Antarctic climate warms and as more people travel to the continent, it is entirely possible that the current system of ASMAs and ASPAs will not be adequate to protect against threats such as invasive species, and in these circumstances a bioregional approach might be entirely appropriate. Perhaps the most important role for professional historians to play in contemporary

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 346

21/12/2016 10:10

Politics and environmental regulation  347 debates about environmental protection in Antarctica is to demonstrate that these discussions do not take place in the vacuum of a ‘technocratic wilderness’, but are strongly connected to the wider politics of the Antarctic continent, both external and internal. Calls for a bioregional approach to conservation have political implications, whether or not their proponents recognize these explicitly. Major changes to the environmental protection regime of Antarctica will bring about changes to the politics of the southern continent. For proponents of a bioregional approach to Antarctic conservation, it is important to acknowledge that opposition to these plans may have nothing to do with the protection of the environment and everything to do with the policy implications of these changes. For opponents of a change to the existing environmental regime, a historical perspective can be used to support the ‘regulate where necessary’ status quo, as was done so effectively in defense of the ATS during the United Nations debates of the 1980s. An appreciation of these wider political contexts highlights the importance of integrating a historical approach into contemporary debates about conservation in Antarctica.

CONCLUSION A discussion of politics and environmental regulation in Antarctica needs to remain grounded in an appreciation of the histories of the environments that are being protected and the ongoing scientific research that such protection allows. If the streambed of Canada Stream were to be constantly disturbed by human activity, for example, there would be no way of attributing the changes in algal mat composition to ‘natural’ changes in the physical environment of the McMurdo Dry Valleys and opportunities for important scientific research would be lost. At the same time, an attempt to understand how and why Canada Stream and the McMurdo Dry Valleys came to be protected needs to take account of much broader political considerations, both within the ATS and beyond it. One major outcome of a historical approach to the question of environmental regulation in Antarctica is to show that however many environmental discussions may take place at a supposedly depoliticized technocratic level, the reality is that politics and environmental regulation have been inextricably connected since the first sighting of the Antarctic ­continent in the early nineteenth century. A political history of environmental protection in Antarctica offers a fascinating case study of the interactions between local, regional, national, and international scales. Although not always completely harmonious in terms of the interactions between various actors, the creation of protected areas within the ATS has played an important role in keeping the politics of Antarctica functioning as a ‘continent dedicated to peace and science’. Friendly competition between members of the ATS over how to protect the Antarctic environment in the best way is by no means a bad outcome, either for the consultative members of the ATS, scientists working on the continent, or for environmental organizations. In fact, these overlapping interests go a long way to explaining the development of the current system of environmental regulation. An appreciation of the history of environmental regulation in Antarctica, however, also suggests that the relationship between politics and conservation has been far from static. Changes in Antarctica’s political structure will likely lead to major changes in the conservation of the environment and changes in environmental regulation will likely affect the politics of the southern

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 347

21/12/2016 10:10

348  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica continent. A historical perspective helps to reveal the complex interconnections between politics and environmental regulation in Antarctica, and an understanding of history has an important role to play in discussions about the future of the continent.

NOTES   1. See, for example, Green 2008. For a summary of the scientific research in the McMurdo Dry Valleys see Priscu 1998.  2. http://www.ats.aq/devPH/apa/ep_protected_detail.aspx?type=2&id=36&lang=e.  3. http://www.mcmurdodryvalleys.aq/management.  4. See Antarctic Protected Areas Database: http://www.ats.aq/devPH/apa/ep_protected_search.aspx?type =2&lang=e.   5. Sutter 2013.   6. Elzinga 1993.   7. Joyner 1998; Antonello 2014a.   8. Quoted in Tin 2013.   9. See, for example, Terauds et al. 2012. 10. Tin 2013. 11. Bellingshausen and Debenham 1945. 12. Gurney 1997. 13. Bonner 1982. 14. For a discussion of the concept of environmental authority, see, for example, Howkins 2011. 15. Hardin 1968. 16. See, for example, Allardyce to Elgin (SoS Colonies), 6 February 1908, Allardyce Papers; MS 240/1-­2;CC Allardyce W. Copies of Dispatches, Volume I. Scott Polar Research Institute. 17. Roberts 2011; Burnett 2012. 18. Howkins 2008. 19. See, for example, León Wöppke 2003. 20. Rigoz 2002; Cordovez Madariaga 1945. 21. Moore and León Wöppke 2011. 22. Scilingo 1963. 23. See, for example, Howkins 2008. 24. Antonello 2014b. 25. Roberts diary entry, Sunday 9 July 1961. MS 1308/11 BJ. Brian Roberts. ATCM Canberra Journal, 1961. Scott Polar Research Institute. 26. Antonello 2014b. 27. See, for example, discussion in Griffiths 2007. 28. Tin 2013. 29. Laws 1992. 30. This is broadly the case made by Griffiths for Australia in Griffiths 2007. 31. Billig 1995. 32. Peat 2007. 33. Parker and Holliman 1978; Vincent 1996. 34. Campbell et al. 1998. 35. Tin 2013. 36. Oral history interviews [will be posted to the MCM LTER website]. 37. Lukin 2014. 38. Pertierra, Tejado and Benayas 2014. 39. See, for example, Beck 1984; 2004. 40. UNO 1984 41. Ibid. 42. Howkins 2011. 43. This statement reflects discussions at the fourth International Polar Tourism Research Network Conference held at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, in August–September 2014. 44. www.iaato.org. 45. Dodds 2011. 46. Dudeney and Walton 2012.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 348

21/12/2016 10:10

Politics and environmental regulation  349 47. Lukin 2014. 48. See, for example, Terauds et al. 2012.

REFERENCES Antonello, A. 2014a. The Greening of Antarctica: Environment, Science and Diplomacy. Australian National University. Antonello, A. 2014b. Nature Conservation and Antarctic Diplomacy, 1959–1964. The Polar Journal 4(2): 335–53. Beck, P. 2004. Twenty Years On: The UN and the ‘Question of Antarctica,’ 1983–2003. Polar Record 40(3): 205–12. Beck, P. 1984. The United Nations and Antarctica. Polar Record 22(137): 137–44. Bellingshausen, T., and F. Debenham. 1945. The Voyage of Captain Bellingshausen to the Antartic Seas ­1819–1821. London: Hakluyt Society. Billig, M. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage. Bonner, W.N. 1982. Seals and Man: A Study of Interactions. Seattle: Washington Sea Grant: Distributed by the University of Washington Press. Burnett, D.G. 2012. The Sounding of the Whale: Science & Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Campbell, I.B., Graeme G.C. Claridge, D.I. Cambell, and M.R. Balks. 1998. The Soil Environment of the Mcmurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica. In Ecosystem Dynamics in a Polar Desert: The Mcmurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica, edited by J.C. Priscu. Washington DC. American Geophysical Union. Cordovez Madariaga, E. 1945. La Antártida Sudamericana. Santiago, Chile: Nascimento. Cronon, W. 1995. The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. Pages 69–90 in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by C. William. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Dodds, K. 2011. Sovereignty Watch: Claimant States, Resources, and Territory in Contemporary Antarctica. Polar Record 47(3): 231–43. Dudeney, J.R., and D.W.H. Walton. 2012. Leadership in Politics and Science within the Antarctic Treaty. Polar Research 31. Elzinga, A. 1993. Antarctica, the Construction of a Continent by and for Science. In Denationalizating Science, edited by E. Crawford, T. Shinn and S. Sőrlin. Dortrecht: Kluwer. Green, B. 2008. Water, Ice and Stone: Science and Memory on the Antarctic Lakes. New York: Bellevue Literary Press. Griffiths, T. 2007. Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Gurney, A. 1997. Below the Convergence: Voyages toward Antarctica, 1699–1839. 1st edn. New York: Norton. Hardin, G. 1968. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 162: 1243–48. Howkins, A. 2011. Melting Empires? Climate Change and Politics in Antarctica since the International Geophysical Year. Osiris 26(1): 180–97. Howkins, A. 2008. Reluctant Collaborators: Argentina and Chile in Antarctica During the IGY. Journal of Historical Geography 34(3): 596–617. Joyner, C.C. 1998. Governing the Frozen Commons: The Antarctic Regime and Environmental Protection. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Laws, R. 1992. Antártida: La Ultima Frontera. Madrid: Ediciones Del Serbal. León Wöppke, C. 2003. Antartica Testimonios Periodisticos 1947–1957. Valparaiso: Editorial Punta Ngeles. Lukin, V.V. 2014. Russia’s Current Antarctic Policy. The Polar Journal 4(1): 199–222. Moore, J.K., and C. León Wöppke. 2011. Passion for the Antarctic: A Short Play. Polar Record 47(3): 271–72. Parker, Bruce C., and M.C. Holliman. 1978. Environmental Impact in Antarctica: Selected Papers by Scientists Addressing Impact Assessment, Monitoring and Potential Impact of Man’s Activities in the Antarctic. Blacksburg, Va: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Peat, N. 2007. Antarctic Partners: 50 Years of New Zealand and United States Cooperation in Antarctica, 1957–2007. Phantom House. Pertierra, L.R., P. Tejado, and J. Benayas. 2014. Historical Developments, Drivers of Change and Future Scenarios for Human Activities on Deception Island. In Antarctic Futures: Human Engagement with the Antarctic Environment, edited by T. Tin, D. Liggett, P.T. Maher and M. Lamers. Dordrecht: Springer. Priscu, J.C. 1998. Ecosystem Dynamics in a Polar Desert: The Mcmurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica. Antarctic Research Series. Washington, D.C.: American Geophysical Union. Rigoz, S. 2002. Hernán Pujato: El Conquistador Del Desierto Blanco. Buenos Aires: Editorial María Ghirlanda.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 349

21/12/2016 10:10

350  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Roberts, P. 2011. The European Antarctic: Science and Strategy in Scandinavia and the British Empire. 1st edn. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Scilingo, A. 1963. El Tratado Antártico; Defensa De La Soberanía Y La Proscripción Nuclear. Buenos Aires: Librería Hachette. Sutter, P. 2013. The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History. Journal of American History 100(1): 94–119. Terauds, A., S.L. Chown, F. Morgan, H.J. Peat, D.J. Watts, H. Keys, P. Convey, and D.M. Bergstrom. 2012. Conservation Biogeography of the Antarctic. Diversity and Distributions 18(7): 726–41. Tin, T. 2013. Environmental Advocacy in the Antarctic Treaty System – a Personal View from the 2000s. The Polar Journal 3(2): 415–30. UNO. 1984. Question of Antarctica: Study Requested under General Assembly Resolution 38/77 Report of the Secretary General. 4 vols. New York: United Nations Publications. Vincent, W.F. 1996. Environmental Management of a Cold Desert Ecosystem: The Mcmurdo Dry Valleys. 1996.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 350

21/12/2016 10:10

23.  Environmental management: the Fildes Peninsula paradigm Christina Braun, Fritz Hertel and Hans-­Ulrich Peter

INTRODUCTION Fildes Peninsula is located to the south-­west of King George Island, South Shetland Island, Antarctic (62°08′ – 62°14′S, 59°02′ – 58°51′W). Together with several adjacent smaller islands within half a kilometer of the coast, the region represents one of the largest ice-­free areas in the maritime Antarctic and is characterized by a high biodiversity. Due to its proximity to South America and its good accessibility, it is the location with the highest density of Antarctic stations. At present, Fildes Peninsula hosts six year-­round stations, built between 1968 and 1994 (Figure 23.1). The construction of the Chilean airstrip in 1980 turned the area into a major logistical hub for the South Shetland Islands and finally the whole Antarctic Peninsula. At present, the number of station personnel exceeds 300 during the summer and 100 during the winter. Scientific, logistic and tourism-­ related activities concentrate here and frequently overlap in space and time. Consequently, conflicts of interests between the different human activities and the requirements of environmental protection often occur. The negative impacts of the exceptionally high level of human activity have been described repeatedly1 and have been addressed several times by inspections carried out under Article 7 of the Antarctic Treaty2 and Article 14 of the Madrid Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (Madrid Protocol).3 Thus, Fildes Peninsula offers a useful model for examining the operationalisation of the political and legal undertakings entered into by State Parties to the primary instruments of the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS). It is, if you will, a location in which one may ground truth the scientific cooperation and environmental protection credentials of the Antarctic political dispensation. At present, a wide range of management tools has been implemented within the Antarctic Treaty area in order to protect biological, paleontological, historical and wilderness values and minimize negative human impacts. The main legal instrument in this regard is the Madrid Protocol, which entered into force in 1998. It provides legally binding requirements of environmental protection for all Parties to the Antarctic Treaty. Five annexes in effect set forth basic principles concerning environmental impact assessment, fauna and flora, waste disposal, marine pollution and protected areas. A sixth annex, Liability Arising from Environmental Emergencies, is still to enter into force. The legal environmental standards provided by the Madrid Protocol are supplemented by a range of recommendations, codes of conduct and guidelines and a number of them are relevant for, or specifically applied on, Fildes Peninsula and the adjacent Ardley Island. Owing to the unique characteristics of Fildes Peninsula and Ardley Island (FPAI), this region has been the subject of two research projects dealing with the environmental 351

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 351

21/12/2016 10:10

352  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

Figure 23.1  Overview of the Fildes Peninsula and Ardley Island 4 situation between 2003 and 2012.5 Based on these data and subsequent observations, a selection of legal frameworks, management tools and guidelines relevant for the studied area are specified regarding their level of effectiveness. Thus, the objectives as well as the limits of the particular management tool are illustrated.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 352

21/12/2016 10:10

Environmental management  353

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ANTARCTIC ENVIRONMENTAL OBLIGATIONS IN PRACTICE Under the Madrid Protocol Taking the existing commitments under each of the five Annexes to the Protocol currently in force in turn: Annex I:  Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Pursuant to Article 8 of the Madrid Protocol, all governmental and non-­governmental activities shall be subject to an assessment of the impacts on the Antarctic environment. The assessment procedures are set out in Annex I. Accordingly, in case an activity is considered as having ‘minor or transitory’ impacts, an Initial Environmental Evaluation (IEE) shall be prepared. If a project is likely to exceed ‘minor or transitory’ impacts, the highest level of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), known as a Comprehensive Environmental Evaluation (CEE),6 shall be applied. The guidelines for EIA are currently under revision by the Committee of Environmental Protection (CEP).7 During the last decade extensive construction activities by the Chilean, Chinese, Russian and Uruguayan national Antarctic programs have been observed on Fildes Peninsula, the purpose being to maintain the existing road network, expand the airdrome infrastructure, erect new buildings (such as a church), or extend or modernize station capacity. Some of these activities led to substantial environmental impacts and therefore would have required an EIA in advance. According to the statements of some station managers, either no EIA or only an IEE was carried out, even when a particular activity resulted in long-­lasting environmental damage8 and might have been anticipated to justify a CEE. One example is the removal of rock and gravel material by quarrying during the bird breeding season, which led to the loss of breeding sites of both burrow-­and ground-­ nesting birds. In addition, beach ridges were irrecoverably removed despite their high scientific value for regional and global paleoclimate research. An examination of an IEE prepared for a major construction project showed serious shortcomings, for example, it denied the presence of vegetation and bird breeding sites in the concerned area, although fauna and flora were known to be present in that area.9 The often inappropriate level of EIA for the likely level of impact has been reported before10 and illustrates an existing conflict between the legal requirements and the Parties’ praxis of planning and execution of activities. Besides, the requirements for the conducting of an EIA provided by Annex I to the Madrid Protocol do not include any attention to the presence of cultural heritage in the form of important historical sites or remains. Therefore, there is a risk of these being damaged during activities subject to EIA11 (for example, construction of buildings or quarrying). This is even promoted, as many of the numerous historic remains on Fildes Peninsula (see below) are little known and have low visibility.12

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 353

21/12/2016 10:10

354  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Annex II:  Fauna and Flora The conservation of Antarctic fauna and flora is the subject of Annex II to the Madrid Protocol (continuing a standard established as far back as the Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora of 1964) the Article 3 of which prohibits ‘taking’ or ‘harmful interference’. ‘Taking’ means, inter alia, to injure, handle or molest native birds or mammals or to remove or damage such quantities of native plants that their local distribution or abundance would be significantly affected. Among others ‘harmful interference’ means ‘significant adverse modification’ of habitats of any species and ‘flying or landing aircraft in a manner that disturbs concentrations of birds and seals’. On FPAI a wide range of breaches of this legally binding regulation can usually be observed. This includes approaching, handling or capturing of animals – often for photography, severe damage of vegetation by pedestrian or vehicular traffic, and the destruction of bird breeding habitats by the extraction of construction material.13 Furthermore, aircraft flights or landings near bird and seal concentrations were repeatedly observed14 in contradiction to the recommendation for aircraft overflight heights.15 Such operations included low overflights over penguin and other bird colonies on Ardley Island (ASPA No. 150, see below). A relatively new potential risk of disturbance for Antarctic wildlife arises with the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in the vicinity of seabirds or seals. Observations on Fildes Peninsula have already shown that the scientific, but especially the private and commercial use of UAVs by film teams has increased, and has already caused disturbance of animals. So far, there are neither guidelines for the use of UAVs nor recommendations for the level of EIA they should elicit. Therefore, the question for an effective regulation, possibly resulting in the development of guidelines including minimum distances for the use of UAVs near animal aggregations, has recently been addressed.16 There have been some declines in breeding pair numbers and breeding success in bird colonies that were observed on Fildes Peninsula are clearly attributable to human ­disturbance.17 Concerns have been expressed about the southern giant petrel, a species considered as a sensitive indicator of human disturbance.18 On Fildes Peninsula, some southern giant petrel colonies frequently visited during summer by station personnel showed rapid decreases in breeding pair numbers and breeding success, whereas colonies with less or without human interference showed an increase. This observation has been interpreted as a shift of nest sites from disturbed to undisturbed areas.19 Another aspect addressed by Annex II in Article 4 is the prevention of the introduction of non-­native species, parasites and diseases. Due to the role of Fildes Peninsula as a logistic hub for numerous national Antarctic programs and non-­governmental activity and the relatively mild maritime climate, the risk of the introduction of non-­native species and the establishment of invasive species is extraordinary high. Non-­native grass species were detected in the vicinity of the Chinese and Russian stations in 2006 and 200820 and subsequently removed according to the existing recommendations.21 No new specimens have been detected since, so eradication has hopefully been successful. Station personnel have reported alien insects in storage facilities at the stations. These were presumably introduced with food supplies or construction materials.22 In 2011, a non-­native mosquito was found on the west coast of Fildes Peninsula23 probably belonging to the same species found in the sewage system of one Fildes station and the colonization status of which is

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 354

21/12/2016 10:10

Environmental management  355 considered as persistent.24 Besides an aquarium with tropical fish, houseplants growing in non-­sterile soil are still kept in at least one station,25 a fact that had been noted by inspection teams in the past.26 Skuas still have access to human food and food remains, including poultry products, through the active feeding by station personnel (see below). This was observed during every austral summer at all stations on Fildes Peninsula.27 That poses a high risk of the introduction and spread of diseases among the native bird populations. The presence of human-­associated microorganisms in seawater samples obtained in the vicinity of Fildes Peninsula has already been recorded,28 emphasizing the threat to the Antarctic environment caused by their introduction. Annex III:  Waste Disposal and Waste Management Annex III to the Madrid Protocol addresses disposal and management of waste in the Antarctic Treaty area. Since its entry into force a waste disposal classification system has been established at all stations on Fildes Peninsula. Waste is usually separated and incinerated either on-­site or removed from the Treaty area accordingly.29 Article 1(5) of Annex III refers to cleaning up existing waste disposal sites. Considering the risk of further environmental damage posed by those often contaminated sites and the need of remediation, the CEP has developed guidelines for a ‘best practice approach’ to cleaning up such sites. Recalling the requirements of Annex III, a resolution was adopted in 2013 encouraging the use of a clean-­up manual developed by the CEP.30 Meanwhile countries have already undertaken clean-­up activities of such sites in order to reduce negative environmental impacts caused by former waste management. For instance, an extensive clean-­up on the Fildes Peninsula was undertaken by the Russian Antarctic Program between 1996 and 2002. The dismantling of old buildings and the removal of large amounts of waste and scrap metal was supported by a NGO.31 In general, little effort was made on Fildes Peninsula during the last decade concerning the several remaining sites with buried waste. In contrast, several station managers confirmed that they had no knowledge at all about past and existing waste disposal sites related to their stations and did not show any or only temporary ambition to address this topic. However, since 2003 some progress regarding waste management was observed concerning the removal of one smaller, long-­existing, open waste deposit and some collapsed buildings or field huts.32 Nevertheless, a multitude of breaches of the provisions of Annex III have taken place. For example, in recent years waste was still burned in the open air33 or inappropriate incinerators were used that leached harmful emissions into the atmosphere.34 Furthermore, several decayed field huts and buildings still remain and contribute to the entry and dispersal of waste into the environment. The area-­wide distribution of waste on Fildes Peninsula has already been documented.35 Records of current waste findings showed clearly that the entry of waste, including hazardous items (such as fuel drums), into the environment continues.36 This is mainly caused by the careless behavior of station personnel during leisure trips, further decay of dilapidated facilities, utilization of inappropriate construction or insulation materials, unsecured packaging materials during logistical operations, but mainly by the existence of open waste deposits. In this regard, a major incident was observed in austral summer 2008/09, when a wide variety of unsorted

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 355

21/12/2016 10:10

356  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica ­ aterial, including hazardous items, was stored outside for at least four months. No measm ures were applied to prevent distribution of that waste by wind. This led to a substantial impact on ASPA No. 150 Ardley Island.37 The access of anthropogenic organic material to skuas and gulls has been reduced significantly since 2003 using closed rooms for the storage of human food remains. However, the continued practice of actively feeding birds, including poultry products, in all stations foils these efforts, is in contravention to applicable laws38 and represents a serious risk to the health of local seabird populations.39 Since 2009 all stations run sewage treatment plants, even though with widely varying technical standards40 and with the constraint that not all living buildings are attached to a sewage treatment plant. Prior to that wastewater from one station which regularly housed more than thirty people in summer was discharged without any treatment. With the newly installed sewage treatment plants, compliance with Article 5 of Annex III to the Madrid Protocol is ensured.41 This effort means a substantial improvement despite the fact that not all living buildings are attached to a sewage treatment plant and that their sewage is discharged untreated into the sea. According to the provision of Annex III, all sewage effluence shall be discharged directly into the sea in order to ensure rapid dispersal. This is followed by most of the resident stations with the exception of two smaller building complexes running their own sewage treatment plants where effluence is apparently discharged into the ground. Another station discharges sewage water into a stream close to its entry into the sea. Regular monitoring of the efficiency of the sewage treatment plants is only carried out by some stations. A pungent smell, high turbidity, foam formation and increased algae growth at some sewage outfalls were even observed after the implementing of new sewage treatment plants, probably indicating poor or ineffective sewage treatment.42 Annex IV:  Marine Pollution The prevention of marine pollution is considered in Annex IV to the Madrid Protocol that prohibits the discharge of oil or certain garbage into the sea. The huge amount of material of anthropogenic origin along the shore of Fildes Peninsula results mainly from marine pollution by ships.43 This marine debris is composed of a large quantity of processed wood (for example, stillages), fishing gear (for example, fishing nets or buoys) and plastic garbage.44 Long-­line hooks or entangled seals found in the study area demonstrate the threat to seabirds and marine mammals posed by fishing activities.45 However, on a few occasions there has been a clear connection between marine debris and resident ­stations or with particular ships or yachts visiting Maxwell Bay.46 Annex V:  Protected Areas Even though Antarctica constitutes a natural reserve in its entirety devoted to peace and science, particular areas contain outstanding values that deserve additional protection. According to the provisions of Annex V, any area may be designated as an Antarctic Specially Protected Area (ASPA) or an Antarctic Specially Managed Area (ASMA). All activities in those areas shall be prohibited, restricted or managed in accordance with the corresponding management plan (Annex V, Article 2). Sites or objects of historic interest

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 356

21/12/2016 10:10

Environmental management  357 within the Antarctic Treaty, once approved as Historic Site and Monument (HSM), ‘shall not be damaged, removed or destroyed’ (Annex V, Article 8). The Antarctic Protected Area Database, maintained by the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat (http://www.ats.aq/ devPH/apa/ep_protected.aspx?lang=e) provides specific information about these areas including location map, management plan, legal status and spatial information. Antarctic Specially Protected Areas (ASPA) Annex V to the Madrid Protocol provides the opportunity to protect any area of ­‘outstanding environmental, scientific, historic, aesthetic or wilderness value, any combination of those values, or ongoing or planned scientific research’ by designation of an area as an Antarctic Specially Protected Area (ASPA) considering a systematic ­environmental–geographic framework. Two of the current 75 ASPAs are located in the southwest of King George Island. ASPA No. 150 Ardley Island was designated due to its high biodiversity in terms of an outstanding flora and diverse bird assemblages and in order to allow scientific research with the least possible interference.47 It adjoins a narrow visitor zone in the northern section of the island.48 ASPA No. 125 Fildes Peninsula was designated by reason of its unique paleontological value as it contains rich outcrops with a wide range of fossil remains.49 According to the current management plan entry into both ASPAs shall only be permitted to holders of a permit issued by an appropriate national authority. Access to both ASPAs shall be on foot or by small boat. Movements within the area shall only be on foot. Any vehicle use or aircraft landing within the area is strictly forbidden. Aircraft operations shall be carried out in compliance with the existing guidelines for the operation of aircraft near concentrations of birds.50 Monitoring of human activities on FPAI, beginning in December 2003, revealed all kinds of infringements of the provisions of the ASPA management plans. This includes leisure visits of station personnel, the collections of fossils and minerals for souvenirs and vehicle use within the protected areas.51 This represents not only breaches of the provisions of the ASPA management plans, but also, in some cases, of the legal standards set out in the Madrid Protocol.52 Several station members stated that they did not receive any, or inappropriate, training or education and had no knowledge of the existence of protected areas and their management plans.53 Copies of management plans have not been available in all stations until recently. Ardley Island in particular, with its medium-­size penguin colony, is a very popular recreational destination for personnel of adjacent stations. Large visitor and mixed scientist-­ visitor groups with more than ten people were observed repeatedly during critical stages of bird-­breeding cycles. In contrast to station personnel, participants of airborne tourist programs or cruise vessels passengers are considered to have a much lower negative impact within the ASPAs, as they only spend a short time there and are usually strictly guided through limited areas beyond the ASPAs. Despite a significant decrease in the number of observed flights below the prescribed minimum vertical and horizontal distance near ASPA No. 150 Ardley Island,54 such flights, almost exclusively conducted by national Antarctic programs, still occur.55 Helicopter landings on ships within the prescribed distance were noticed as well. Further negative impacts to ASPA No. 150 were caused by open waste disposal and major spillage

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 357

21/12/2016 10:10

358  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica of fuel in adjacent stations. Moreover, there is no effective coordination between scientists conducting field work on Ardley Island. In both ASPAs vegetation damage caused by pedestrians and vehicles as well as clear behavioral responses of breeding birds ­(southern giant petrel, penguins, skuas, Antarctic tern) to human disturbance were repeatedly observed. In summary, besides the lack of coordination of research activities, logistic and leisure activities contribute substantially to human disturbance of fossil deposits, fauna and flora. Even though short-­term effects of human impact are below the detection limit, negative long-­term effects on the assets to be protected by the designation of an ASPA as well as detrimental impacts on future research activities can be expected. Antarctic Specially Managed Area (ASMA) An ASMA can be any area where activities are being conducted or may be conducted in the future, to assist in the planning and coordination of activities, avoid possible conflicts, improve cooperation between Treaty Parties or minimize environmental impacts. Compared to ASPAs an ASMA does not exclusively focus on conservation, but it should provide that human activities are carried out in an environmentally sound manner, keeping the human footprint as small as possible. Further, activities should be well organized and the different Parties should cooperate and coordinate their activities in space and time, scientific output should be efficient while duplicated work should be avoided.56 Currently, six ASMA designations are in force. The corresponding Management Group should convene on a regular basis to review past, existing and future activities in order to coordinate and record activities, facilitate communication, monitor environmental impacts and spread information and educational material on site. An environmental risk assessment of fauna and flora related to changes in human activities in the Fildes Peninsula region concluded that an appropriate solution for reducing the conflict of interests would be the designation of the Fildes region as an ASMA, an option that would create legally binding regulations for all Antarctic Treaty Parties.57 The main reason for this is that many of the recorded shortcomings might be caused by insufficient information, cooperation and coordination between the different Treaty Parties with stations on site as well as by an insufficient compliance with legal regulations. On the basis of this body of data, the prognosis for future developments in the Fildes region emphasized the need for effective management measures to reduce negative impacts of human activities in the region, for example, through its designation as an ASMA. This initiated an international debate within the CEP about possible management options, which lasted several years,58 but is currently dormant. As long there is an ongoing disagreement between different stakeholders about an appropriate environmental management of the Fildes Peninsula59 a significant improvement of the environmental situation seems to be beyond reach. Historic Sites and Monuments (HSM) and Pre-­1958 Historic Remains At present, the Fildes Peninsula hosts four HSMs approved by the ATCM. Three are either a plaque or monolith and are in good condition, according to the purpose of their designation. The youngest HSM in the area (HSM No. 86) is represented by the former

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 358

21/12/2016 10:10

Environmental management  359 main building of the Chinese station. It was adopted in 2011, celebrating the commencement of China’s Antarctic research in the 1980s. However, the building constituting the HSM was already in a very poor state of repair at the time of the designation as an HSM, and this was confirmed in December 2012 by an inspection carried out under Article 7 of the Antarctic Treaty and Article 14 of the Madrid Protocol.60 The inspection team also stated that considerable effort would be necessary to repair the building to bring it up to an appropriate state for later conversion into a museum. China declared it was willing to undertake the management of the HSM and that the repair plan and application for funding were to be finalized. Surprisingly, the building was completely dismantled in austral summer 2013/14 and a new building providing room for living quarters as well as a museum was erected in a so-­called ‘rejuvenation’ (according to the EIES pre-­season information) As well as the officially listed HSMs, Antarctica holds a wide range of sites and artefacts dating from the period of the early exploration and exploitation of this continent. These sites and materials are of high historical and cultural importance and are subject to the ‘Guidelines for handling of pre-­1958 historic remains whose existence or present location is not known’ provided by the ATCM.61 However, as these guidelines were created as an interim protection and ‘should not extend beyond three years after the discovery of a new historic artefact/site has been brought to the attention of the Parties’, they do not provide sustainable protection. Along the coastline of Fildes Peninsula there are a multitude of sites that contain the historic remains of whaling and sealing expeditions dating back to the 1820s.62 These sites are exposed to natural impacts by wind, frost shattering, sand entombment and animal activity. Not clearly visible or easily identified by non-­ specialists, these sealers’ sites may be easily disturbed by visitors.63 Thus, tourism activities and the large number of station personnel in close proximity roaming freely in the area pose risks to the historic sites by inadvertent damage or the collection of souvenirs. Therefore, knowledge of the cultural value of historic remains needs to be improved. This information should be available to the authorities responsible for the preparation of EIAs as well as to tourist guides and, particularly, to members of national Antarctic Programs. Guidelines and Recommendations The following provisions are hortatory elements and emanate either from the ATS (resolutions and associated guidelines) or from para-­Antarctic bodies, such as SCAR (the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) and COMNAP, which are not formally part of the ATS. ATCM – Guidelines for the Operation of Aircraft Near Concentrations of Birds in Antarctica Fixed and rotary-­wing aircraft operations play an important role in Antarctic logistics, especially during the sensitive breeding period of most animals. In order to minimize potential disturbance, and changes in the behavior, physiology and breeding success of wildlife, and in order to ensure compliance with Annex II to the Madrid Protocol (see above), guidelines for aircraft operations have been adopted.64 The recommended minimum distances to concentrations of birds are also reflected in

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 359

21/12/2016 10:10

360  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica the legally binding provisions of the management plan for ASPA No. 150 Ardley Island (see above). During the last decade breaches of the recommended minimum distances for aircraft operations has been repeatedly observed on FPAI.65 Helicopter landings within a half nautical mile distance to Ardley Island’s penguin and southern giant petrel colonies were reported. Formally prohibited helicopter landings on a rock plateau on the coast, the breeding site of several bird species including Sooty Albatrosses,66 have nonetheless occurred.67 ATCM – Visitor Guidelines Increases in tourism activities in the Antarctic led to the adoption of guidelines for visitors and those organizing and conducting tourism and non-­governmental activities.68 Due to the steady growth in cruise tourism, the industry, in terms of the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO), has taken responsibility and implemented guidelines for specific landing sites. The purpose of those locally restrictive Site Guidelines is to protect the Antarctic environment by avoiding an overuse of frequently visited sites and minimizing potential environmental impacts. The need for regulation of cruise tourism has been agreed at ATCMs and hence visitor site guidelines have been adopted by resolutions since 2005.69 These General Guidelines for visitors to the Antarctic were adopted70 in order to complement site-­specific information. Site guidelines for a coastal zone in the north-­east of Ardley Island, which was excluded from the ASPA No. 150, were developed and adopted in 2011.71 The majority of visitors to Ardley Island are guided groups, which arrive with a private tour company offering flights from Chile. Passengers of cruise vessels visiting the local penguin colony play a minor role as they move exclusively within the visitor zone and are always attended by guides during landings. In contrast to these visitors, passengers traveling on national Antarctic program ships were repeatedly observed to roam freely and unguided in the landing area and approaching penguins and seals closely.72 These passengers stated, when questioned, that they had not been informed about existing guidelines for visitors. SCAR – Codes of Conduct Recognizing the potential environmental impact caused by the conducting of terrestrial field research,73 SCAR developed codes of conduct in order to minimize impacts. A considerable augmentation of the research activities of many Parties has been observed on FPAI over the last decade. This is mostly associated with the extended accommodation and research capacities of resident stations. Consequently, the conduct of scientific field work in the area substantially increased, leading to additional human pressure on the local environment.74 This is promoted by inadequate coordination and cooperation between researchers, a fact that has been repeatedly addressed by SCAR.75 Besides environmental impacts, duplication of research projects may lead to mutual interference and, therefore, to detrimental effects on the quality of results.76 The preliminary information about planned research that has to be submitted to SCAR and the ATCM is not concerned with the coordination of research projects or the initiation of cooperation. It is kept very general and is often not publicly available.77 Currently, coordination of field research activities is limited to personal communication between researchers, in order to

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 360

21/12/2016 10:10

Environmental management  361 avoid potential conflicts as well as environmental impacts.78 Compliance with SCAR’s codes of conduct depends largely on the personal attitude of the researchers. Environmental impacts caused by research activities in the studied area ranged from vegetation damage caused by vehicle use beyond the road network, scientific facilities which were no longer in use, structures of long-­term experiments that were broken shortly after installation due to inappropriate materials, disturbance of birds or residues left in the field.79 Investigators working with animals without the appropriate qualifications or experience to conduct procedures on animals, and the application of unsuitable invasive methods have been observed.80 This indicates that appropriate EIA has not been prepared for all research projects. Finally, existing codes of conduct have turned out to be ineffective. COMNAP – Operational Recommendations Following its constitution, the purpose of the Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs (COMNAP) is to ‘develop and promote best practice in managing the support of scientific research in Antarctica.’ In this regard COMNAP provides operational guidelines, handbooks and manuals. The most recent publications cover fuel, waste and energy management.81 Guidance for the constitution of effective environmental monitoring regimes for activities in the Antarctic is provided by practical guidelines and a technical handbook, the latter developed by SCAR and COMNAP.82 The importance of reducing accidental introductions of non-­native species into the Antarctic area is widely recognized, and has been emphasized in research projects.83 As prevention within the logistics and supply chain has come increasingly into focus, COMNAP and SCAR have developed voluntary checklists for supply chain managers. Inclusion of these checklists within the Non-­Native Species Manual, developed by SCAR and adopted by ATCM in 2011,84 is necessary. Observations on Fildes Peninsula on operational matters during the last decade have revealed numerous positive steps in order to fulfill the best-­practice recommendations developed by COMNAP. These include the exchange of old single-­walled fuel tanks and improved energy management by modernization of buildings.85 On the other hand, many shortcomings in the implementation of the COMNAP recommendations were observed as well.86 For instance, chronic fuel pollution was still evident in most stations on Fildes Peninsula. This was mainly caused by spillage during fuel transfer, leaking station tanks and pipelines or damaged vehicles. Major oil spills occurred in 2005, 2009 and 2014.87 The applied mitigation measures turned out to be largely inadequate and resulted in widespread pollution of the local marine environment.88 Incidents such as open waste burning and open waste dumps are neither in compliance with COMNAP’s recommendations, nor with Annex III to the Madrid Protocol (see above). The unintentional introduction of a rat while construction materials were being transported and the use of non-­native moss as sealing material has been documented.89 This revealed a lack of awareness of the risks of introducing non-­native species by previous national Antarctic programs. The occasional presence of alien insects in storage facilities (see p. 354) indicate that prevention measures, if any are applied, are not effective. A variety of such shortcomings have repeatedly been taken up in inspection reports,90 but at best the recommendations have been only partially implemented.91

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 361

21/12/2016 10:10

362  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

CONCLUSIONS With the adoption of the Madrid Protocol in 1991 Antarctica has been designated as ‘a natural reserve, devoted to peace and science’.92 Since then, a multitude of legally binding and non-­binding provisions have been developed in order to minimize human pressure on the Antarctic ecosystem. Due to the unique concentration of different human activities on FPAI – the most concentrated area of human activity in the entire Antarctic Treaty Area – many, if not most, of these provisions have relevance in this area. Sadly, FPAI serves as a paradigm for inadequate implementation of these well-­intentioned provisions, whether codified in the Madrid Protocol or earlier Antarctic Treaty and subsidiary instruments or practices. By means of long-­term monitoring of the environmental situation some improvement in the implementation of several aspects of the Madrid Protocol by a number of national Antarctic programs (for example, waste or fuel management and sewage treatment) has been noted. But these improvements need to be seen in the context of widespread and continuing breaches of environmental protection standards in the area. The level and the range of human activities and the overall cumulative impacts on FPAI are expected to grow further. Therefore, increased efforts to reduce current impacts and to minimize further environmental risks are essential. Implementation of the provisions set out in the Madrid Protocol’s Annexes I to V should receive the highest priority. First of all, greater efforts should be made to comply strictly with the legal requirements for the management of waste, oil and sewage at the stations. National Antarctic programs should be encouraged to adopt best practices laid out by COMNAP. The effectiveness of the existing precautions to prevent the introduction of non-­native organisms within the logistic and supply chain should be reviewed. Furthermore, the Parties should ensure that for all planned activities an EIA at a level appropriate for the likely level of impact is prepared in a timely manner in advance of the activity. Consistent submission of information about EIA, ASPA visitation and research projects to the ATS’s Electronic Information (EIES) could contribute to improved coordination and cooperation of research and logistic projects. Tourism accounts only for a fraction of the human activities that occur on FPAI. Due to their longer presence in the area, generally, station personnel have a higher potential to cause environmental impacts than tourists.93 Responsible behavior of people, whether as tourists or as members of a national Antarctic program, is a key aspect to minimizing human disturbance of fauna, flora and historic remains. This could be improved by an increased dissemination of information, such as mandatory briefings and awareness training for all people present in the area. Inspections under Article 7 of the Antarctic Treaty are endowed with a broad and functional legal mandate. They are very valuable for providing critical information on the level of implementation of the Antarctic Treaty and the Madrid Protocol, through observations on site.94 Inspections have repeatedly revealed a variety of shortcomings in station operations and have pointed out the frequent duplication of logistics and research projects. However, in extremely busy areas such as the Fildes Peninsula region a coordinated long-­term environmental monitoring program is essential to complement the more snap-­shot character of the inspections. This could be supported by the implementation of minimum environmental monitoring requirements and compulsory reporting to EIES.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 362

21/12/2016 10:10

Environmental management  363 The implementation of a legally binding ASMA in the Fildes region is considered an appropriate instrument, as ASMAs aim to achieve to ‘assist in the planning and coordination of activities, avoid possible conflicts, improve cooperation between Parties or ­minimize environmental impacts’ (see Annex V). The discussion process on environmental management that started in 200495 is currently dormant, as there is no agreement between the stakeholders present in the area about regulatory measures The lessons provided by the Fildes Peninsula paradigm are that environmental ­management measures are inefficient as long as there are no consequences in cases of non-­compliance with the existing regulations. Doubtless, the adoption of an additional Annex VI to the Madrid Protocol concerning ‘liability arising from environmental emergencies’ may increase the efforts, at the very least, to comply with the legally binding provisions. The annex may have a deterrent effect for those who operate less responsibly in Antarctica, since environmental damage could then result in the imposition of remediation or clean-­up costs to the polluter.96 Considering the scarce coastal ice-­free areas that provide habitat for a substantial number of Antarctic species, much work remains to ensure the adequate implementation of environmental management on Fildes Peninsula and Ardley Island.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We thank the station personnel and scientists on Fildes Peninsula for providing information and support and members of the Polar and Bird Ecology Group, University Jena, for their help in the field. Without the logistic support from Aerovías DAP, Alfred-­Wegener Institute, Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (Russia), Fuerza Aréa de Chile, Hansa Kreuzfahrten, Hapag Lloyd Kreuzfahrten, Instituto Antártico Chileno and Polar Star Expeditions, the project would not have been possible. We thank J. Hilbert, E. Budde and the editors and reviewers, for their assistance with this work and helpful comments on the manuscript.

NOTES   1. For example, see Tin and Roura 2004; ASOC 2007; Pfeiffer et al. 2007; Peter et al. 2008; Braun et al. 2012; Braun et al. 2013; Peter et al. 2013.   2. 1 December 1959, 402 UNTS 71.   3. 4 October 1991, 30 ILM 1461.   4. Map modified after Braun et al. 2012, 2.   5. Peter et al. 2008; Peter et al. 2013.   6. On CEEs, see, for example, Hemmings and Kriwoken 2010.   7. Australia 2014.   8. Peter et al. 2008, 136, 139; Peter et al. 2013, 32, 34–5, 38.   9. Peter et al. 2008, 140. 10. Bastmeijer and Roura 2008, 16; Braun et al. 2012, 16. 11. Bastmeijer and Roura 2008, 19. 12. Roura 2010, 303. 13. Peter et al. 2008, 142–7, 214–44; Peter et al. 2013, 28, 40–01, 81–3, 89–92. 14. Peter et al. 2008, 122–5; Peter et al. 2013, 75–6. 15. ATS 2004 16. Par. 138, Final Report XXXVIII ATCM.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 363

21/12/2016 10:10

364  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

Braun et al. 2012, 11. For example, see Gonzalez-­Solis et al. 2000; Pfeiffer and Peter 2004. Peter et al. 2008, 185–186; Peter et al. 2013, 12. Peter et al. 2008, 246–9; Peter et al. 2013, 29. ATS 2011b. Peter et al. 2008, 247; Peter et al. 2013, 29. Peter et al. 2013, 19. Volonterio et al. 2013, 1126; United Kingdom 2015. Hughes et al. 2013a; Peter et al. 2008, 245–6; Peter et al. 2013, 30; unpubl. data. For example, see USA 2001, 2007. Peter et al. 2008, 67–72; Peter et al. 2013, 52–3. Hernández et al. 2012. For example, see United Kingdom et al. 2013. ATS 2013. Russia 2002. Peter et al. 2008, 66, 94; Peter et al. 2013, 46, 55; unpubl. data. Peter et al. 2008, 58–9; Peter et al. 2013, 59. Peter et al. 2008, 65; Peter et al 2013, 54, 56. Peter et al. 2008, 60–63. Peter et al. 2013, 51–2; unpubl. data. Braun et al. 2012, 8; Peter et al. 2013, 57. Art. 4 Annex II Madrid Protocol. Peter et al. 2013, 17, 53, 93. Peter et al. 2013, 61. Peter et al. 2013, 61–5. Braun et al. 2012, 8; Peter et al. 2013, 63–4. Peter et al. 2008, 62–3. Peter et al. 2008, 152–3. Peter et al. 2008, 154–5; Peter et al. 2013, 13, 52. Peter et al. 2013, 53. ATS 2009b. The visitor zone is subject to regulations by specific site guidelines (see below). ATS 2009a. ATS 2004; minimum distances are also provided in the Antarctic Flight Information Manual as Appendix 7. Peter et al. 2008, 284, 286; Peter et al. 2013, 91, 95. Hughes et al. 2013b, 123. Peter et al. 2013, 92. Vertical 2000 ft (610 m) and horizontal minimum distances 1500 ft (460 m) provided in ATS 2004, 2009b. Peter et al. 2013, 75–6; unpubl. data. Borbor-­Cordova et al. 2007. Peter et al. 2008, 313; Germany 2004. Germany 2009. Germany and Chile 2007. United Kingdom et al. 2013, 41. ATS 2001. For example Chile 2007; Braun and Lüdecke, 2012. For example Lüdecke 2010, 222; Senatore and Zarankin 2011, 603. ATS 2004. Peter et al. 2008, 122–5; Peter et al. 2013, 75–6. Lisovski et al. 2009, 1811. Peter et al. 2008, 122; unpubl. data. ATS 1994. Krakau and Herata 2013, 113. ATS 2011a. ATS 2011c. Braun et al. 2012, 14. For example, see De Villiers 2008. Braun et al. 2012, 10, 13. SCAR 2001; 2009. Braun et al. 2012, 13. Peter et al. 2013, 84.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 364

21/12/2016 10:10

Environmental management  365 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

Peter et al. 2008, 253; Braun et al. 2012, 13. Peter et al. 2008, 250–3; Peter et al. 2013, 84–5. Peter et al. 2013, 84. COMNAP 2007; 2008; 2013. COMNAP and SCAR 2000; COMNAP 2005. For example, see Huiskes et al. 2014. ATS 2011b. United Kingdom et al. 2013. USA 2007; United Kingdom et al. 2013. Peter et al. 2008, 78–80; Peter et al. 2013, 65–8; unpubl. data. Peter et al. 2008, 78–80; Peter et al. 2013, 65–8; unpubl. data. Peter et al. 2008, 136. For example, see United Kingdom and Germany 1999; USA 2001; Australia et al. 2005; USA 2007; United Kingdom et al. 2013. Braun et al. 2012, 2. Article 2. Braun et al. 2012, 13. UNEP and ASOC 2012, 11. Braun et al. 2013, 182–4. Hughes and Convey 2014, 5.

REFERENCES ASOC (Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition). 2007. Implementing the Madrid Protocol: A case study of Fildes Peninsula, King George Island. Information Paper 136. Thirtieth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, New Delhi. ATS (Antarctic Treaty Secretariat). 1994. Tourism and non-­governmental activities (includes: Guidance for Visitors to the Antarctic and Guidance for those Organising and Conducting Tourism and Non-­governmental Activities in the Antarctic). Recommendation XVIII-­1. Eighteenth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Kyoto. ATS (Antarctic Treaty Secretariat). 2001. Guidelines for handling of pre-­1958 historic remains whose existence or present location is not known. Resolution 5. Twenty-­fourth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, St Petersburg. ATS (Antarctic Treaty Secretariat). 2004. Guidelines for the operation of aircraft near concentrations of birds. Resolution 2. Twenty-­seventh Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Cape Town. ATS (Antarctic Treaty Secretariat). 2009a. Revised Management Plan for Antarctic Specially Protected Area No. 125 Fildes Peninsula, King George Island (25 May). Measure 6. Thirty-­second Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Baltimore. ATS (Antarctic Treaty Secretariat). 2009b. Revised Management Plan for Antarctic Specially Protected Area No. 150 Ardley Island, Maxwell Bay, King George Island (25 May). Measure 9. Thirty-­second Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Baltimore. ATS (Antarctic Treaty Secretariat). 2011a. General Guidelines for Visitors to the Antarctic. Resolution 3. Thirty-­fourth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Buenos Aires. ATS (Antarctic Treaty Secretariat). 2011b. Non-­ native Species Manual. Resolution 6. Thirty-­ fourth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Buenos Aires. ATS (Antarctic Treaty Secretariat). 2011c. Site Guidelines for Visitors. Resolution 4. Thirty-­fourth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Buenos Aires. ATS (Antarctic Treaty Secretariat). 2013. Antarctic Clean-­Up Manual. Resolution 2. Thirty-­sixth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Brussels. Australia. 2014. Review of the Guidelines for Environmental Impact Assessment in Antarctica. Working Paper 29. Thirty-­seventh Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Brasilia. Australia, Peru and UK. 2005. Report of Joint Inspections under Article VII of the Antarctic Treaty and Article 14 of the Environmental. Working Paper 32. Twenty-­eighth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Stockholm. Bastmeijer, K. and R. Roura. 2008. Environmental Impact Assessment in Antarctica. Pages 175–219 in Bastmeijer, K. and T. Koivurova (eds), Theory and Practice of Transboundary Environmental Impact Assessment. Leiden, Boston: Brill/Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Borbor-­Cordova, M.J., T. Brito, R. Montone, P. Gagliuffi and M. Riofrio. 2007. An international effort to

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 365

21/12/2016 10:10

366  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica manage and monitor Admiralty Bay (ASMA No. 1), King George Island, in Antarctica: A Keystone in a Changing World – Online Proceedings of the 10th ISAES X, edited by A.K. Cooper and C.R. Raymond et al., USGS Open-­File Report 2007-­1047, Extended Abstract 187, 1–4. Braun, C. and C. Lüdecke. 2012. Fildes Peninsula – A Place of Threatened Historic Sites. Presented at: IPHC Conference ‘Conservation Challenges, Solutions and Collaboration Opportunities in Uncontrolled Environments’, Hobart, International Polar Heritage Committee: http://www.polarheritage.com/content/ library/Cornelia_Luedecke_Brau_IPHC_2012.pdf. Braun, C., F. Hertel, O. Mustafa, A. Nordt, S. Pfeiffer and H.-­U. Peter. 2013. Environmental Situation and Management Challenges for the Fildes Peninsula Region. Pages 169–91 in Tin, T., D. Liggett, P. Maher and M.E. Lamers (eds), The Future of Antarctica: Human Impacts, Strategic Planning, and Values for Conservation. Dordrecht: Springer. Braun, C., O. Mustafa, A. Nordt, S. Pfeiffer and H.-­U. Peter. 2012. Environmental Monitoring and Management Proposals for the Fildes Region (King George Island, Antarctica). Polar Research 31: 18206. Chile. 2007. Historic Sites of the Northern Coast of Fildes Peninsula, King George Island (South Shetland Group). Information Paper 127. Thirtieth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, New Delhi. COMNAP (Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs). 2005. COMNAP Practical Guidelines for Developing and Designing Environmental Monitoring Programmes in Antarctica. COMNAP (Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs). 2007. COMNAP’s 2006 Workshop on Waste Management in Antarctica. Information Paper 98. Thirtieth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, New Delhi. COMNAP (Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs). 2008. The COMNAP Fuel Manual, incorporating revised guidelines for fuel handling and storage in Antarctica. Information Paper 91. ­ ­Thirty-­first Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Kiev. COMNAP (Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs). 2013. Best Practice for Energy Management – Guidance and Recommendations. Information Paper 34. Thirty-­sixth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Brussels. COMNAP (Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs) and SCAR (Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research). 2000. Antarctic Environmental Monitoring Handbook. Standard techniques for monitoring in Antarctica. De Villiers, M. 2008. Review of recent research into the effects of human disturbance on wildlife in the Antarctic and sub-­Antarctic region. Pages 2–41 in Human Disturbance to Wildlife in the Broader Antarctic Region: A Review of Findings. Appendix 1 to Working Paper 12. Thirty-­first Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Kiev. Germany. 2009. Research Project ‘Current Environmental Situation and Management Proposals for the Fildes Region (Antarctic)’. Information Paper 50. Thirty-­second Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Baltimore. Germany and Chile. 2007. Progress Report on the Discussion of the International Working Group about Possibilities for Environmental Management of Fildes Peninsula and Ardley Island. Information Paper 22, rev.1. Thirtieth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, New Delhi. Germany and Poland. 2014. UAVs and their possible environmental impacts. Working Paper 5. Thirty-­seventh Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Brasilia. Gonzalez-­Solis, J., J.P. Croxall and A.G. Wood. 2000. Foraging partitioning between giant petrels Macronectes spp. and its relationship with breeding population changes at Bird Island, South Georgia. Marine Ecology Progress Series 204: 279–88. Hemmings, A.D. and Kriwoken, L.K. 2010. High level Antarctic EIA under the Madrid Protocol: safe practice and the effectiveness of the comprehensive environmental evaluation process. International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics 1(3): 187–208. Hernández, J., J. Stedt, J. Bonnedahl, Y. Molin, M. Drobin, N. Calisto-­Ulloa, C. Gomez-­Fuentes, M. Astorga-­ España, D. González-­Acuña, J. Waldenstroem, M. Blomqvist and B. Olsen. 2012. Human-­associated extended spectrum b-­Lactamase (ESBL) in the Antarctic. Applied and Environmental Microbiology 78: 2056–8. Hughes, K.A. and P. Convey. 2014. Alien invasions in Antarctica – is anyone liable? Polar Research 33: 22103, http://www.polarresearch.net/index.php/polar/article/view/22103. Hughes, K.A., P. Convey and A.H.L. Huiskes. 2013a. Global movement and homogenisation of biota: ­challenges to the environmental management of Antarctica? Pages 113–37 in Tin, T., D. Liggett, P. Maher, M.E. Lamers (eds), The Future of Antarctica: Human Impacts, Strategic Planning, and Values for Conservation. Dordrecht: Springer. Hughes, K.A., L. Pertierra and D.W.H. Walton. 2013b. Area protection in Antarctica: How can conservation and scientific research goals be managed compatibly? Environmental Science and Policy 31: 120–32. Huiskes, A.H.L., N.J.M. Gremmen, D.M. Bergstrom, Y. Frenot, K.A. Hughes, S. Imura, K. Kiefer, M. Lebouvier, J.E. Lee, M. Tsujimoto, C. Ware, B. Van de Vijver and S.L. Chown. 2014. Aliens in Antarctica: Assessing transfer of plant propagules by human visitors to reduce invasion risk. Biological Conservation 171: 278–84.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 366

21/12/2016 10:10

Environmental management  367 Krakau, M. and H. Herata. 2013. Antarctic tourism and international legal regulations. Pages 111–21 in Müller, D.K., L. Lundmark and R.H. Lemelin (eds), New Issues in Polar Tourism: Communities, Environments, Politics. Dordrecht: Springer. Lisovski, S., V. Pavel, K. Weidinger and H.-­U. Peter. 2009. First breeding record of the Light-­mantled Sooty Albatross (Phoebetria palpebrata) for the maritime Antarctic. Polar Biology 32: 1811–13. Lüdecke, C. 2010. Gorgeous landscapes and wildlife: the importance and danger of Antarctic tourism. Estudios Polares y Hemisféricos 1: 213–31. Peter, H.-­ U., C. Braun, S. Janowski, A. Nordt, A. Nordt and M. Stelter. 2013. The current environmental situation and proposals for the management of the Fildes Peninsula Region. German Federal Environment Agency, Dessau-­ Roßlau, Texte 03/2013. http://www.umweltbundesamt.de/publikationen/ current-­environmental-­situation-­proposals-­for. Peter, H.-­U., C. Buesser, O. Mustafa and S. Pfeiffer. 2008. Risk assessment for the Fildes Peninsula and Ardley Island, and the development of management plans for their designation as Antarctic Specially Protected or Specially Managed Areas. German Federal Environment Agency, Dessau-­Roßlau, Texte 20/2008. http://www. umweltbundesamt.de/publikationen/risk-­assessment-­for-­fildes-­peninsula-­ardley-­island. Pfeiffer, S., C. Buesser, O. Mustafa and H.-­U. Peter. 2007. Tourism growth and proposed management solutions in the Fildes Peninsula Region (King George Island, Antarctica). Tourism in Marine Environments 4: 151–65. Pfeiffer, S. and H.-­U. Peter. 2004. Ecological studies toward the management of an Antarctic tourist landing site (Penguin Island, South Shetland Islands). Polar Record 40: 345–53. Roura, R. 2010. Monitoring the transformation of historic features in Antarctica and Svalbard: local processes and regional contexts. Polar Record 46: 289–311. Russia. 2002. Results of the Waste Disposal Project at Bellingshausen Station. Information Paper 16. ­Twenty-­fifth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Warsaw. SCAR (Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research). 2001: Recommendation SCAR XXVI‑6: Concerning rationalization of scientific activities on King George Island. SCAR Bulletin. 141. SCAR (Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research). 2009. Report of SCAR’s 3rd Cross-­Linkages Workshop. SCAR Bulletin. 171. Senatore, M.X. and A. Zarankin. 2011. Tourism and the invisible historic sites in Antarctica. Electronic Proceedings ICOMOS General Assemby Scientific Symposium Part III Session Development as Tourism. ICOMOS, Paris. Tin, T. and R. Roura. 2004. Environmental reports of Fildes Peninsula, 1988–1997: benchmarks for ­environmental management. Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition. UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) and ASOC (Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition). 2012. Review of the Implementation of the Madrid Protocol: Inspections by Parties (Article 14). Information Paper 59. Thirty-­fifth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Hobart. United Kingdom. 2015. Colonisation status of known non-­native species in the Antarctic terrestrial environment: a review (updated 2014). Information Paper 46, Attachment B: Supplementary information. ­Thirty-­eighth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Sofia. United Kingdom and Germany. 1999. Report of a Joint Inspection under Article VII of the Antarctic Treaty, Antarctic Treaty Inspection Programme: January 1999. Working Paper 23. Twenty-­third Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Lima. United Kingdom, Netherlands and Spain. 2013. Report of Antarctic Treaty Inspections undertaken jointly by the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Spain in accordance with Article VII of the Antarctic Treaty and Article 14 of the Environmental Protocol. Attachment to Information Paper 38. Thirty-­sixth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Brussels. USA. 2001. The Inspection Conducted in Accordance with Article VII of the Antarctic Treaty and Article XIV of the Protocol Under Auspices of the United States Department of State. Information Paper 17. ­Twenty-­fourth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, St Petersburg. USA. 2007. United States Report of Inspections. Information Paper 10. Thirtieth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, New Delhi. Volonterio, O., R.P. de Leon, P. Convey and E. Krzeminska. 2013. First record of Trichoceridae (Diptera) in the maritime Antarctic. Polar Biology 36: 1125–31.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 367

21/12/2016 10:10

24.  The changing face of political engagement in Antarctic tourism Daniela Liggett and Emma Stewart

INTRODUCTION While the development of tourism in the Antarctic has been evaluated in many publications, its political intricacies remain comparatively under-­researched.1 Research on Antarctic tourism regulation and management2 is growing, but most of this research only touches upon aspects of power and control.3 In this chapter, we explore the politics informing and under-­writing Antarctic tourism, with a particular focus on the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties’ (ATCP) engagement with tourism at Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings (ATCMs), the topics of discussion, the decisions made and the coalitions formed. We track the development of the political debate around Antarctic tourism, which largely follows, albeit remaining a few steps behind, the development of Antarctic tourism activities over the last half century. We start by providing a brief overview of tourism development, and a short review of tourism governance mechanisms in the Antarctic. As our conclusion makes explicit, Antarctic tourism is deeply entangled with politics at the local, national and international scale. Antarctic Tourism Development Tourism to the Antarctic is not a new phenomenon, with the earliest voyages carrying passengers identified as ‘tourists’ to the Antarctic region being traced back to the late nineteenth century.4 These voyages, which were undertaken by the New Zealand government, were regular forays to New Zealand’s and Australia’s sub-­Antarctic islands, searching for castaways and checking provisions deposited on these islands for shipping disaster emergencies.5 Similar servicing and relief voyages were made by Argentinean and British naval vessels to the sub-­Antarctic islands in the Atlantic sector and were complemented by whaling factory ships and trawlers that occasionally offered passage to the Falkland Islands/Malvinas for private citizens and the paying public.6 However, by the mid-­1960s, reflecting a global appetite for recreational travel, regular and purely commercial cruising to the Antarctic began. The Swedish-­American travel organizer, adventurer and entrepreneur Lars-­Eric Lindblad organized these early cruise trips initially on chartered vessels and later on the purpose-­built 1A ice-­classed M/V Lindblad Explorer.7 It was Lindblad’s belief that direct, first-­hand experience by tourists coupled with education, would promote a greater understanding of Antarctica’s role in the global environment,8 a philosophy that largely remains in place today.9 As Figure 24.1 reveals, since the early tourist voyages, ship-­based tourism peaked in the first decade of the twenty-­first century, after it had increased rapidly in the early 1990s. At 368

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 368

21/12/2016 10:10

369

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 369

21/12/2016 10:10

Air & cruise combination

Overflights

Land based (air supported)

Cruise only (no landings)

Expedition cruises (landings)

6 8 0 2 4 6 8 0 2 4 6 8 0 2 4 6 8 0 2 4 6 8 0 2 4 6 /6 /6 /7 /7 /7 /7 /7 /8 /8 /8 /8 /8 /9 /9 /9 /9 /9 /0 /0 /0 /0 /0 /1 /1 /1 /1 65 967 969 971 973 975 977 979 981 983 985 987 989 991 993 995 997 999 001 003 005 007 009 011 013 015 9 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 Seasons

0

5,000

10,000

15,000

20,000

25,000

30,000

35,000

Figure 24.1  Number of tourists visiting Antarctica (1965–2016) based on IAATO statistics (www.iaato.org) and a range of sources for data prior to 199117

Note:  The 2015/16 data denote forecasted instead of reported numbers.

Tourist numbers

370  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica this time, former Soviet ice-­strengthened vessels of the Akademik fleet became available for long-­term charter, on the open market, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the ending of the Cold War confrontation in the Arctic.10 Despite a slump following the global financial crisis around 2009, expedition cruise-­ship tourism remains popular and, according to IAATO records, is on the rise again. Figure 24.1 also highlights that from the start of the twenty-­first century ship-­based activities have diversified to include ‘cruise-­only’ options. These are large vessels (carrying upwards of 1000 passengers) which do not make on-­shore landings.11 Despite a peak around 2010 these are now decreasing due to increased costs associated with new International Maritime Organization (IMO) requirements related to having vessels operate on light marine fuel oil only while in Antarctic waters. More recently, fly-­cruise packages whereby visitors fly to the South Shetland Islands and then join a cruise ship have also entered the market and appear to be on a steady trajectory of growth. It is also worth noting that small-­vessel operations (including private and commercial yachts) have grown over the last decade (Orams, 2010).12 Antarctic ship-­based tourism has not been without incident. There have been a series of accidents over the last decade,13 with the most serious occurring on 23 November 2007, when the M/V Explorer (formerly the M/V Lindblad Explorer), the first vessel purpose-­ built for polar tourism sank in Bransfield Strait, some 25 miles southeast of King George Island.14 The vessel which was, at that time, operated by Canada-­based GAP Shipping Co. and which was flying the Liberian flag, was passing through compact and hard ice too speedily, and suffered serious damage to its hull after making contact with a ‘wall of ice’.15 All 154 passengers and crew were rescued by the nearby vessel M/V Nordnorge, but the accident could have resulted in many deaths had such support not been available so quickly. By comparison to ship-­based activities, land-­based and airborne tourism operations are small. Regular overflights (without landing) started in the 1970s, but were terminated after the tragic loss of all 257 passengers and crew on board an Air New Zealand DC-­10 that crashed into Mount Erebus in the Ross Sea Region on 28 November 1979. Overflights resumed in the mid-­1990s from Australia and Chile. Small-­scale land-­based tourism activities (largely supported by air), principally expeditions and other adventure activities, to the Antarctic interior started in the 1980s from a semi-­permanent base at Patriot Hills. More recently, land-­based or near-­shore activities, such as overnight camping, kayaking and hiking, have also been combined with cruise voyages. The majority of tourism activities occur in and around the Antarctic Peninsula, which reflects the fact that this region is the most accessible, having the shortest sea crossing from South America. The Ross Sea Region, accessible by ship and air from New Zealand and Australia, as well as Dronning Maud Land, accessible by air from South Africa, are other regions that attract a small number of visitors during the relatively short Antarctic tourism season generally regarded as taking place between November and March in the austral summer.16 Since the peak season of 2007/08 when Antarctic tourists numbered in excess of 45,000, there was a decline, largely explained by the global financial crash, before a return to growth in the 2011/12 season. While visitors have traditionally heralded from North America, Europe and Australasia (Bauer, 2001), recent figures indicate a growing interest from China (see www.iaato.org).

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 370

21/12/2016 10:10

The changing face of political engagement  371 Antarctic Tourism Governance Antarctica’s geographical isolation and harsh climate, on the one hand, and its unresolved sovereignty situation,18 on the other hand, resulted in a unique governance arrangement19 for the continent, which promotes scientific collaboration while hinging on an ‘agreement to disagree’ regarding the sovereignty situation. The governance of Antarctic tourism exhibits similarly unique characteristics of multi-­lateral collaboration, constrained by consensus requirements for political decision-­making and a range of different philosophical and political stances with regard to tourism, and significant industry input. Antarctic tourism governance occurs on three different levels: an international governmental level, a national governmental level and a transnational non-­governmental level. On an international governmental level, all human activities in Antarctica and its surrounding waters south of 60º S latitude are governed by the Antarctic Treaty and its associated measures, conventions and protocols, collectively known as the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS).20 In practice and as it affects the national citizens and tour operators based in Antarctic Treaty signatory states, ATS governance is principally performed through national laws and policy, with the individual signatory states to the respective ATS measures playing a paramount role. In the international forum, Antarctic governance builds on the collective and consensual choices made by ATCPs. Decision-­making is largely facilitated through annual ATCMs, which are used by ATCPs to present and discuss matters of concern, including tourism, and to negotiate and vote on regulatory mechanisms. The discussions at ATCMs are being stimulated primarily by Working Papers on current matters that are being submitted by ATCPs, with Information Papers allowing Parties to share and critique ideas or data and providing an opportunity for observer or expert groups, other invited organizations or Non-­Consultative Parties to voice their viewpoints, with the ability to influence the discussions over the management and regulation of tourism. On a transnational and non-­governmental level, Antarctic tourism is self-­regulated through the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO), which was established in 1991 by a group of seven tour operators. IAATO has implemented a wide range of operational procedures and policies for, and with, its more than 100 members. Furthermore, the association functions as a main point of contact regarding tourism matters for the ATS21 and is generally regarded as being a key component of managing tourism in Antarctica.22 However, it should be noted that not all tour operators are members of IAATO. We draw on the body of Working Papers and Information Papers23 on tourism that have been submitted to ATCMs to understand and position the discussion on tourism within the political context of the ATS. We accessed the relevant papers through the ATS database (www.ats.aq). Although offering a comprehensive record of the documents submitted to ATCMs as well as the final ATCM reports, this database is not yet complete. Some meeting documents (especially some early documents from the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s), while being listed in the database, are not downloadable. Furthermore, some documents are incorrectly listed in the database, with the submitting Parties misidentified, the document titles listed incorrectly, or the same documents archived twice but under different paper titles and numbers. The documents database has only very recently been compiled, and the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat is still working on corrections and updates.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 371

21/12/2016 10:10

372  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Prior to the establishment of the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2001, meeting documents were compiled and held by the states hosting ATCMs, so some documents may have been misfiled or lost, resulting in gaps in the record of papers with which were working. While we have tried to correct these errors in our own databases, we acknowledge that some errors may persist, and the results discussed in this chapter will have to be viewed with this caveat in mind. The different phases of the ATS’s engagement with tourism matters deserves further scrutiny and will be explored below by identifying a number of hallmark events that shifted the focus of the tourism discussion at ATCMs. This then helps to understand better the regulatory actions taken by the ATCPs, with a view towards exploring the contributions of individual Parties and other actor groups and highlighting the relative influence these actors have on the way in which tourism is being discussed and regulatory actions are being decided. We conclude our analysis with a brief assessment of regulatory challenges and a question to consider related to the potential futures of Antarctic tourism politics.

TOURISM AND THE ANTARCTIC TREATY SYSTEM At the time the Antarctic Treaty was drafted in 1959 and entered into force in 1961, tourism was not a pressing matter for the negotiators and their conference agenda in Washington DC. At the time of the treaty conference in December 1959, only a few cruises to the South Shetland Islands and Antarctic Peninsula, a tourist flight to the Ross Sea and a tourist over-­flight of the South Shetland Islands had taken place.24 Tourism was practically non-­existent and politically insignificant in the face of bigger issues, such as containing Cold War-­related uncertainties related to the Antarctic and maintaining peace and the sovereignty status quo. Tourism was mentioned neither in the 1959 Antarctic Treaty nor in any of the first four major agreements25 forming the ATS. While Antarctic tourism was generally considered to represent a legitimate and peaceful activity that was not contradicting any of the values put forth in the Antarctic Treaty,26 its legitimacy within the ATS was only officially acknowledged when tourism found explicit mention in the 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (the Protocol).27 Despite the direct reference to ‘tourism and all other governmental and non-­ governmental activities in the Antarctic Treaty area’ (Articles 3, 8 and 15 of the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty), the Parties continued to struggle with defining Antarctic tourism, and its multiple forms – from ship-­borne tourism to overflights to land-­based adventure activities. The broad definition of tourism adopted by the UNWTO28 would include the ‘activities of all persons travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environment’ and, consequently, in the Antarctic context would include the touristic activities that staff from National Antarctic Programmes (NAPs) may undertake in their spare time. Some polar scholars also include NAPs in their definitions of Antarctic tourism, such as Hall who offers the following definition of Antarctic tourism as ‘all existing human activities other than those directly involved in scientific research and the normal operations of government bases.29 ATCPs, however, continue to stress a dichotomy between science and tourism, and generally view tourism as something done by ‘others’ outside NAPs. Technically speaking, even if we consider travel operators very narrowly as those

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 372

21/12/2016 10:10

The changing face of political engagement  373 offering touristic activities in the Antarctic or transport to the Antarctic for a fee, some NAPs who sell spare berths on their vessels, seats on flights or accommodation would fall into this category.30 The engagement with Antarctic tourism via the ATS, and primarily through Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings developed over the years from no mention of Antarctic tourism prior to 1966, to a dedicated Working Group on Tourism and Non-­Governmental Activities, which was established at the 27th ATCM in Cape Town (2004). Each year between 2004 and 2015, this Working Group has operated for approximately one week of the ATCM. The nature of political engagement with tourism matters has changed over the years as much as the intensity of this engagement. We can distinguish between five phases of engagement: Indifference (Prior to 1966) The ATCPs were preoccupied with making the Antarctic Treaty work, and tourism matters were not discussed at ATCMs. Antarctic tourism itself was in its infancy and, as clearly shown in Figure 24.1, was not a regular occurrence in the early-­to mid-­1960s. The very few small-­scale forays into the Antarctic Treaty area made by operators at that time were not a concern to ATCPs and did not warrant their full attention. Antarctic tourism itself was perceived as ‘a minor inconvenience’.31 Science-­Tourism Dichotomy in the Pre-­Protocol Era (1966–1990) Tourism was now an annual occurrence, and one aspect of the attractiveness of the regular cruises to the Antarctic Peninsula were visits to active research stations. With science being sacrosanct for the ATCPs, the potential disruption of research activities, or daily life at research stations, through tourist visits provoked a reaction from the ATCPs, whose deliberations, at the time, focussed intensively on furthering the two core values of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty: science and security.32 Visits to stations in the Antarctic had direct implications for scientific projects and the operation of these stations. NAPs took notice, and tourism matters began to permeate discussions at ATCMs. The ATCPs began to debate the potential effects of tourism on science and the running of Antarctic research stations. The development of Antarctic tourism was followed more closely, and the ATCPs focussed on regulating station visits by tour operators and limiting access to certain areas that were considered scientifically significant. Because of the way in which science and scientific ideology and practice were foundational agents of the Antarctic Treaty itself, it was without question that science had priority over any other human activity in the Antarctic, and while the environmental impacts of tourism were beginning to come under scrutiny, especially towards the end of this phase, the tourism debate was biased towards the effects tourism might have on base operations, scientific programmes and the political ambitions of the ATCPs. The discussion on tourism was dominated by five of the Antarctic claimant states (Argentina, Australia, Chile, New Zealand and the UK) and the USA as a semi-­claimant, with France, Belgium, Norway, Poland and South Africa making a contribution.33 Overall, the discussion on tourism was very much geared towards recognizing and, in an ad hoc fashion, addressing potential threats tourism might pose rather than recognizing and promoting possible opportunities or

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 373

21/12/2016 10:10

374  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica benefits arising from tourism.34 In this crucial, early regime-­building phase of the ATS, the Parties were primarily concerned with promoting the general acceptance and uptake of ATS regulatory measures, the protection of the scientific project as the ATCPs’ core activity35 and the minimization of the risk that other human activities could entail for the NAP operations.36 Interestingly, even after the devastating Erebus disaster in 1979, tourism hardly received any attention at the ATCMs. A sole mention of this tragedy was made in the final report of the 1981 ATCM XI (Buenos Aires, Argentina) in reference to a statement made by New  Zealand in plenary and to Recommendation XI-­3, which was adopted by the meeting and that declared the site of the accident a tomb. Concerns around Conduct and Tourism Regulation (1991–2003) The burgeoning Antarctic tourism industry and a significant increase in tourist visits, especially in the Antarctic Peninsula region, resulted in greater focus on the management of tourist conduct and the monitoring of tourism development. Since 1991 ‘tourism and non-­governmental activities’ have been a standing item on the agenda of ATCMs. Since its establishment in 1991, IAATO contributed to the considerable increase in the number of Information Papers submitted to ATCMs. ATCM XVI in Bonn, Germany, in 1991 also saw the formation of a sub-­working group on tourism, which was tasked with the review of the issue of tourism and the status of its regulation (Final Report ATCM XVI 1991, 31–2). The adoption of the Protocol in 1991, which regulates all human activities, changed the thrust of discussions around tourism in the ATCMs. France took the lead in proposing an additional Annex to the Protocol dealing exclusively with tourism and non-­governmental activities. France was supported in this proposal by Chile,37 Germany, Italy and Spain (Final Report ATCM XVII 1992, 40). The Anglophone ATCPs argued that the Protocol regulated all human activities, including tourism, and that an additional Annex on tourism might weaken the overall implementation of the Protocol.38 In a sense, the immediacy, forcefulness and divided character of the debate around tourism regulation after the adoption of the Protocol hinted at a lack of unanimity with regard to the perceived ability of the Protocol to address satisfactorily and to regulate Antarctic tourism.39 The discussions on tourism in the ATCMs were still dominated by the seven claimant states, which submitted the majority of the Working Papers on tourism. Non-­governmental actors, with IAATO and the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC) taking the lead, were playing an increasingly important role in influencing the tourism discussions by submitting Information Papers. Through such papers, IAATO reports on its members’ tourism operations in the Antarctic highlighting the organization’s mandate to ‘promote and practice sound and environmentally responsible private-­sector travel to the Antarctic’ (www.iaato.org), with the intention of pre-­empting any moves the ATCPs might make towards the adoption of more stringent regulatory mechanisms on tourism. ‘Advocating on behalf of the Antarctic environment, ecosystems and its wildlife’ (see www.asoc.org), ASOC argues for a tighter and more strategic regulation of Antarctic tourism by the ATCPs and contributes well-­researched Information Papers that endeavour to stimulate regulatory action by the ATCPs.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 374

21/12/2016 10:10

The changing face of political engagement  375 Narrowing Focus on Special Activities (2004–2007) As mentioned earlier, a Working Group on Tourism and Non-­governmental Activities was established within the ATCM in 2004.40 In response to growing concern about the increasing numbers of tourists visiting the Antarctic and the diversification of Antarctic tourism activities, the first dedicated Antarctic Treaty Meeting of Experts (ATME) on Tourism was held in 2004. While the engagement with tourism matters and the concern around the regulation of tourism activities generally increased, the focus taken by individual Working and Information Papers narrowed. The papers discriminated between different types of tourism, and the discussions became more nuanced; for example, there was a greater focus on site-­specific management. Ship-­borne tourism, flags of convenience, port-­state vs. flag-­state jurisdiction and the fledging debate around developing a polar shipping code under the umbrella of the IMO received a lot of attention during ATCMs. Spatially focussed and distinctive Antarctic tourism management was taken into consideration to a greater extent than ever before, and concerted efforts were initiated by the UK to adopt site-­specific guidelines to manage tourism activities at frequently visited sites, with an initial focus on sensitive sites in the Antarctic Peninsula (see WP26 submitted to ATCM XXVII, 2004, by the UK). The UK’s proposal built on work undertaken by Oceanites,41 which compiled an Antarctic Site Inventory of quantitative ecological data on a wide range of sites in the Antarctic Peninsula. Concern was mounting regarding the issue of adventure tourism, on which Parties continued to struggle to define and compile data. Enhanced cooperation among Parties to exchange information on adventure tourism, and other tourism activities, was called for, and Parties looked into the establishment of databases to support the management and exchange of information (see WP40 submitted to ATCM XXVII, 2004, by Australia). The tourism discussion, especially with respect to policy proposals, continued to be dominated by the claimant states, and IAATO and ASOC were to be the greatest contributors of Information Papers. However, a greater diversity of Parties (Ecuador, Italy, Russia, Ukraine and Uruguay) vocalized their thoughts on the matter of tourism primarily by contributing Information Papers, presumably as these Parties were dealing with tourist visits to their research stations or with regulatory obligations through the Protocol and the mandated Environmental Impact Assessment requirements. Human Safety and Environmental Security (Since 2008) Although no lives were lost as a result of the sinking of the M/V Explorer, this serious accident caused a lingering desire to prepare for and insure against the potential for future shipping incidents in Antarctic waters. After the unfortunate sinking, not surprisingly, the tourism discussion at ATCMs turned its attention to the specifics of ship-­borne tourism, devoting more time to debating the prevention of incidents and accidents as well as matters of risk – both from an environmental and human-­safety perspective. A push was made towards the development and adoption of a shipping code specifically for operations in polar waters.42 Additionally, attention was paid to yachting and independent expeditions to the Antarctic. The breadth of topics covered by Information Papers, as well as the proportion of Working Papers focussing on tourism, increased substantially. A subset of papers moved

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 375

21/12/2016 10:10

376  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica away from focussing on narrow topics and entertained a more strategic viewpoint that looked at the bigger picture of Antarctic tourism regulation and attempted to identify pathways for strengthening and future-­proofing the ATCPs’ approach to regulating Antarctic tourism activities. ASOC, the Netherlands and the UK,43 encouraged the formulation of a strategic vision44 and proactive tourism regulation and management. From a regulatory perspective, this phase can also be described as the age of site-­specific guidelines, with guidelines being developed and adopted for a rapidly increasing number of sites, not only in the Antarctic Peninsula region but also in Victoria Land, East Antarctica and the Ross Sea (see www.ats.aq). The development of Antarctic tourism, in particular the increase in the number of tourists travelling to the Antarctic and the diversification of tourist activities, is reflected in the intensification of the political engagement with Antarctic tourism issues. Figure 24.2 charts this intensification of engagement (by the number of Working and Information Papers submitted to the ATCM) against the development of tourist numbers over the years. Three hallmark events identified in the preceding paragraphs (the adoption of the Protocol in 1991, the first ATME dedicated purely to tourism in 2004, and the sinking of the M/V Explorer in 2007) stimulated a significant change in the focus of the tourism discussions and mark the start of new epochs in the ATCMs’ engagement with tourism; these are highlighted by the vertical lines in Figure 24.2. Interestingly, while the adoption of the Protocol in 1991 created a flurry of political activity on the matter of how tourism was addressed by the Protocol, when it entered into force in 1998, the number of Working Papers on tourism dropped to zero for a couple of years. This development was also reflected in the lack of regulatory action taken by the ATCMs in those two years (see Figure 24.5) when not a single regulatory mechanism on tourism was adopted by the Parties. We speculate that the lack of regulatory action on tourism directly after the entering into force of the Protocol resulted from a mixture of complacency, or potentially even exhaustion, after what must have been a politico-­administrative marathon, and a sense of confidence that the environmental impacts of tourism activities were addressed by the Protocol. To get a better understanding of the relative attention Parties devoted to tourism matters at ATCMs, Figures 24.3 and 24.4 compare the number of tourism-­related Working and Information Papers submitted to ATCMs and ATMEs with the overall number of Working and Information Papers submitted. Over the last decade, we have witnessed a significant increase of political attention to Antarctic tourism issues, reflected by a greater percentage of Working Papers dedicated to tourism matters since the 2004 ATME. In fact, the ATME on Tourism in 2004 stands out – twenty-­fve Working Papers on tourism can be attributed to this ATME, out of a total of twenty-­six Working Papers submitted to the ATME. Of course, as this ATME focussed on tourism issues, this is not surprising. What is more surprising is the broadening of the discussion at the 2009 ATME on Ship-­borne Tourism, with eight out of a total of fifteen Working Papers and five out of a total of sixteen Information Papers submitted to this ATME focusing on generic issues related to shipping (e.g. marine pollution, search and rescue issues, changing sea-­ice conditions) rather than tourism specifically.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 376

21/12/2016 10:10

377

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 377

21/12/2016 10:10

Number of WPs and IPs

66 68 70 72 75 77 79 81 83 85 87 89 91 92 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20

Tourist numbers

Tourism IPs

Tourism WPs

0

5,000

10,000

15,000

20,000

25,000

30,000

35,000

40,000

45,000

50,000

Figure 24.2  Total number of Working Papers and Information Papers on tourism issues submitted to ATCMs and ATMEs over the last fifty years

Notes:  The shaded bars in the graph pinpoint the years when ATMEs were held (an ATME on Shipping in 2000, an ATME on Tourism in 2004, and an ATME on Ship-­borne Tourism in 2009). It is noteworthy that only one Information Paper and no Working Papers on tourism were submitted to the 2000 ATME on shipping.

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

Number of tourists

378

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 378

21/12/2016 10:10

66 68 70 72 75 77 79 81 83 85 87 89 91 92 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20

Total Working Papers Tourism Working Papers

Total Working Papers Tourism Working Papers

Figure 24.3  Number of tourism Working Papers vs. total number of Working Papers submitted to ATCMs over time

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

379

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 379

21/12/2016 10:10

66 68 70 72 75 77 79 81 83 85 87 89 91 92 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20

Total Information Papers

Tourism Information Papers

Figure 24.4  Number of tourism Information Papers vs. total number of Information Papers submitted to ATCMs over time

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

180

380  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

REGULATORY ACTION BY THE ATCMS As the engagement with tourism matters in the ATCM over the years shifted from an atmosphere of indifference to apprehensive attempts at limiting undesirable developments, so did the scale and scope of regulatory action by the ATCPs. The ATCPs have a range of tools available to create mechanisms regulating human activity in the Antarctic Treaty area. They can add substantial binding regulatory components, such as stand-­ alone protocols and conventions, to the ATS, and they can agree on additional regulatory mechanisms addressing specific issues or activities that are either of a mandatory (Measures) or hortatory (Resolutions) nature. Further, they can make Decisions on administrative questions (for example, data management) related to tourism. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, regulatory action was dedicated to strengthening and growing the ATS by adding substantial pieces of regulation that focussed on addressing those matters that had not been dealt with in the Antarctic Treaty, namely living and non-­living natural resources and environmental protection, culminating in the negotiation of the Protocol.45 Following the negotiation and signing of the Protocol, the regime experienced a stasis, which caused critical questions to be asked regarding the regime’s adaptability, continued relevance and ability to address increasing external and internal pressures.46 In the meantime, the Parties busied themselves with a seemingly ad hoc and piecemeal approach of adopting largely hortatory mechanisms aimed at containing the risks related to unfettered tourism development. The years since the 2004 ATME on tourism saw a disproportionally large number of mainly Resolutions, but also a handful of Decisions and Measures, added to the body of ATS tourism regulation. Between 2004 and 2007, 26 per cent, and between 2008 and 2014, 10 per cent, of all regulatory mechanisms adopted during ATCMs addressed matters related to tourism, which is made clear in Figure 24.5. On the one hand, this reveals the focus Parties had taken to a site-­based tourism management approach, which involves the adoption of site guidelines for frequently visited sites.47 On the other hand, however, the increase in regulatory mechanisms adopted reflects a growing concern by Parties about the recent diversification and growth of Antarctic tourism, which is also mirrored by the increasing number of Working Papers submitted over the last decade (see Figure 24.5). In total, 10 per cent of the regulatory mechanisms adopted since 1966 are on tourism-­ related topics. A more detailed analysis of the topics addressed by Information and Working Papers on tourism (see Table 24.1) shows that there is a significant overlap with the material focus of the regulatory mechanisms adopted (Table 24.2), with the exception of matters of tourism policy-­making or the development of a regulatory strategy for Antarctic tourism. These are addressed in Working or Information Papers at almost every ATCM since 1966, but due to the conceptual character of these broader questions around tourism regulation, they do not lend themselves easily to transformation into regulatory mechanisms. They have been setting the scene for the discussion of regulatory principles and have certainly contributed, albeit indirectly, to the adoption of milestone measures, such as Measure 4 (2004) on insurance and contingency planning or Measure 15 (2009) on tourist shore landings,48 and have certainly instigated further investigation of tourism regulation or decisions to hold ATMEs on tourism-­related topics.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 380

21/12/2016 10:10

381

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 381

21/12/2016 10:10

66 68 70 72 75 77 79 81 83 85 87 89 91 92 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20

Total number of regulatory mechanisms

Tourism WPs

Number of tourism regulatory mechanisms

Figure 24.5 ATCM regulatory mechanisms, tourism regulatory mechanisms and tourism Working Papers49

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

382  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Table 24.1 Topics addressed in ATCM/ATME papers on tourism between 1966 and 2014 Topics addressed

WPs

IPs

Total

TS Tourism strategy/policy SG Site guidelines SB Ship-­based tourism IT Impacts of tourism TD Tourism development TC Tourist conduct/behaviour LB Land-­based tourism IA Incidents/accidents ST Science tourism DM Data management YT Yacht tourism PT Permanent tourism infrastructure AB Air-­based tourism Total

68 41 23 21 15 10 8 6 8 4 5 1 1 211

62 35 45 20 77 11 10 15 11 10 7 3 1 307

130 76 68 41 92 21 18 21 19 14 12 4 2 518

Table 24.2 Topics addressed by regulatory mechanisms adopted in ATCMs over the last fifty years  

Total

Site Guidelines Shipping Reporting Strategy/Policy Operator practice SAR/Emergency Landing restrictions Station visits Further discussion Impacts/Conservation Land-­based tourism Total

12 11 5 5 4 3 3 3 2 1 1 50

Resolutions

Measures

Decisions/Recommendations

12 (2005–2014)   8 (1998–2012)   4 (1995–2005)   5 (2005–2014)   2 (2004; 2007)   2 (1997; 2010)   1 (2007)  0  0  0   1 (2012) 35

0 0 0 0 0 1 (2004) 1 (2009) 0 0 0 0 2

0 3 Dec. (2004–2006) 1 Dec. (2013) 0 2 Rec. (1979;1994) 0 1 Rec. (1970) 3 Rec. (1966–1975) 1 Rec. (1991); 1 Dec. (2003) 1 Rec. (1972) 0 13

Actors and Coalitions The main state actors contributing to the ATS tourism discussions are the seven claimant states and the USA as the leading semi-­claimant and polar operator. As can be deduced from Tables 24.3 and 24.4, the claimant states are responsible for approximately two thirds of the Working Papers and slightly more than one quarter of the Information Papers on tourism. Taking into consideration the semi-­claimants (the USA and Russia), approximately 83 per cent of the tourism-­related Working Papers have been submitted by this group of nine states. Other ATCPs, particularly Germany, Spain and the Netherlands, are making a contribution to the tourism discussion and tourism regulation in the ATCMs,

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 382

21/12/2016 10:10

The changing face of political engagement  383 Table 24.3 Tourism-­focussed papers submitted to ATCMs and ATMEs between 1966 and 2014 by (co-­)authoring Parties relative to the total number of papers these Parties (co-­)submitted   Argentina ASOC ATS Australia Belgium Brazil Bulgaria Chile COMNAP Ecuador France Germany IAATO IHO IMO Italy IUCN Japan Netherlands New Zealand Norway Poland Romania Russian Federation South Africa Spain Sweden Ukraine United Kingdom United States Uruguay WTO Total

Tourism WPs 30 2 1 29 1 0 0 21 3 2 21 10 3 0 0 5 0 3 7 30 16 2 0 4 3 8 1 4 65 46 0 0 371

Total WPs % Tourism WPs 178 4 19 273 67 24 3 222 32 12 136 72 4 1 0 40 0 41 49 265 111 18 4 99 42 28 18 5 438 326 22 0 2553

16.85% 50.00% 5.26% 10.62% 1.49% 0.00% 0.00% 9.46% 9.38% 16.67% 15.44% 13.89% 75.00% 0.00% n/a 12.50% n/a 7.32% 14.29% 11.32% 14.41% 11.11% 0.00% 4.04% 7.14% 28.57% 5.56% 80.00% 14.84% 14.11% 0.00% 0.00% 12.42%

Tourism IPs

Total IPs

% Tourism IPs

21 50 0 6 1 2 1 6 6 2 8 10 125 1 2 1 1 0 1 19 7 0 1 4 0 1 0 2 30 33 2 3 346

125 180 2 188 49 62 25 170 82 42 58 98 125 23 5 70 14 91 45 146 74 17 2 133 45 52 26 35 203 152 72 3 2414

16.80% 27.78% 0.00% 3.19% 2.04% 3.23% 4.00% 3.53% 7.32% 4.76% 13.79% 10.20% 100.00% 4.35% 40.00% 1.43% 7.14% 0.00% 2.22% 13.01% 9.46% 0.00% 50.00% 3.01% 0.00% 1.92% 0.00% 5.71% 14.78% 21.71% 2.78% 100.00% 14.33%

Note:  The highlighted cells are the top 10 (co-­) authors of WPs and the top 12 (co-­) authors of IPs. Claimant states are displayed in bold.

but are quantitatively trailing far behind the claimant states and the USA in terms of the number of meeting papers submitted on tourism. Among the newer players, Ukraine shows a disproportionally large engagement in tourism matters compared to other topics. This is hardly surprising considering that Ukraine’s Vernadsky Station (formerly the UK’s Faraday Station) is one of the tourism hotspots in the Antarctic Peninsula region, and

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 383

21/12/2016 10:10

384  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Table 24.4 Summary of tourism-­focussed papers submitted to ATCMs and ATMEs between 1966 and 2014 by groups of Parties sharing specific characteristics relative to the total number of papers these submitted by these fractions   Claimant states Average per claimant Semi-­claimants   (US & Russia) Average per semi-­  claimant Non-­claimant states Average per non-­  claimants Original AT Signatory  states Average per original   signatory Acceding Parties  (ATCPs) Average per acceding  ATCP Acceding Non-­  Consultative Parties (Romania) Other actors Average per other actors

Tourism WPs

Total WPs

% Tour. WPs

Tourism IPs

Total IPs

% Tour. IPs

212 30 50

1623 232 425

13.06%

92 13 34

964 138 285

9.54%

25

213

17

143

46 2

445 19

10.34%

23 1

731 32

3.15%

269

2198

12.24%

127

1434

8.86%

22

183

11

120

39

291

21

544

4

26

2

49

0

4

0.00%

1

2

50.00%

9 1

60 8

15.00%

188 24

434 54

43.32%

11.76%

13.40%

11.93%

3.86%

that Ukraine has an open-­door policy for tourists and other visitors to their station.50 Ukraine has been actively involved in developing site guidelines for Wordie House, which is in the vicinity of Vernadsky Station, and is, at the same time striving to find a balance between benefitting from touristic visits to the station economically and by repute, and effectively managing and supervising those visits.51 Acceding non-­consultative Parties are conspicuously absent from the tourism discussion, despite their ability to contribute Information Papers. Only one paper has so far been contributed by a Non-­consultative Party (see Tables 24.3 and 24.4), which is not surprising considering that the submission of papers involves significant efforts by the submitting party and does not in itself earn the respective Non-­consultative Parties an elevated status in the ATCMs; Parties have to demonstrate significant scientific interest and engagement to achieve Consultative Party status. While the state actors are clearly, and by the very design of the ATS, steering the policy-­making processes around Antarctic tourism through Working Papers, contextual and conceptual discussions on tourism are significantly influenced by non-­state actors, particularly IAATO and ASOC (see Figure 24.6). IAATO uses Information Papers as an efficient vehicle to convey an annual summary of its members’ activities to the Parties and to advocate its members’ responsible and environmentally aware approach to Antarctic

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 384

21/12/2016 10:10

385

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 385

21/12/2016 10:10

92

19

94

19

95

19

96

19 19

97 19

98

99

19

Information papers by ASOC

Information papers by IAATO

00

20

01

20

Figure 24.6  Information Papers by IAATO and ASOC

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

02

20

03 20

04 20

05 20

06 20

07 20

08 009 010 011 012 013 014 20 2 2 2 2 2 2

386  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Table 24.5  Information Papers by IAATO and ASOC by topic and authorship Topic/authorship

Tourism development Tourism strategy Ship-­based tourism Site guidelines Impacts of tourism Tourist conduct/behaviour Land-­based tourism Science and tourism Data management Incidents/Accidents Permanent tourism  infrastructure Yacht tourism

IAATO

ASOC

Solo-­authored IPs

Co-­authored IPs

Solo-­authored IPs

Co-­authored IPs

44 20 17 10 7 7 5 3 2 2 1

0 0 4 1 0 0 0 1 3 2 0

3 2 1 1 4 16 2 0 5 1 2

0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

1

3

16

0

tourism. In the realm of ATS politics, IAATO presents itself as a conscientious actor, who respects ATS voluntarily adopting regulatory mechanisms, often before they are in effect, in order to avoid more stringent rule-­setting by the ATCPs.52 In this sense, contributing to the tourism discussion through the submission of Information Papers enables IAATO to a certain extent to highlight its proactive and environmentally responsible approach to tourism operations, doubtlessly with the welcome side effect of deferring an unwelcome future of more stringent ATS regulation. ASOC acts as the environmental conscience of society in the ATS tourism discussion and contributes well-­researched and critical Information Papers which highlight not only regulatory shortfalls, but which actively seek to advance the intellectual depth of the tourism debate in the ATCM. While IAATO focuses on descriptive accounts of tourism operations, thus recording tourism development over time, ASOC attempts to garner contemporary scholarship on pressing current issues related to Antarctic tourism, for example, an investigation of the implications of growing yacht tourism, matters related to port-­state vs. flag-­state jurisdiction, issues of risk, safety and tourist conduct, as highlighted in Table 24.5. While the majority of ASOC’s and IAATO’s papers are single-­authored contributions, the number of jointly authored papers on tourism by ATCPs has significantly increased over time. With a few exceptions, co-­authored Information Papers remain relatively rare53 but over the last decade, prolific coalitions have developed around Working Papers. These coalitions reflect the aforementioned claimant states’ and the USA’s dominant role in the tourism debate, but reveal a surprisingly common, yet unexpected, coalition between Argentina and the UK (who have long-­standing sovereignty disputes inside the Antarctic and beyond in the South West Atlantic region), as is made clear in Table 24.6. Three logical explanations of such an unexpected coalition come to mind: (a) Many of the jointly authored Working Papers related to site-­specific guidelines, and traditionally those Parties with better knowledge of the respective sites or a specific stake, for example, due to the sites being situated within claimed territory or in the vicinity of certain stations,

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 386

21/12/2016 10:10

The changing face of political engagement  387 Table 24.6  Most frequent coalitions on Working Papers Coalitions on Australia Chile Germany New Zealand Norway Spain United Kingdom Working Papers Argentina Australia Chile France Germany New Zealand Norway Spain Ukraine United Kingdom

4                  

8 1                

0 1 1 3            

0 3 1 4 1          

6 3 6 2 1 3        

5 0 6 1 1 0 5      

 

13 7 6 3 2 2 9 5 4

USA 11 8 6 2 3 5 8 5 1 19

Note:  Only Parties who worked together on more than two papers are included in this table. Claimant states are shown in shaded cells.

are involved in proposing these site guidelines. As the British and Argentine sovereignty claims overlap and as some of the two states’ stations are in close proximity to each other, it can be expected that both states have a similarly significant stake in certain sites being protected by site-­specific guidelines, resulting in co-­authored Working Papers. (b) Both Argentina and the UK claim to be a gateway port to the Antarctic54 and, naturally, some of their interests in regulating ship-­borne tourism and yacht activity to the Antarctic Peninsula coincide. In addition, tour operators often visit both British stations and Argentine stations in a single trip. (c) Collaboration on Working Papers may simply be a diplomatic method as co-­authorship on Working Papers might dissuade the respective collaborator from cross-­examining the paper in plenary or from objecting to recommendations or regulatory mechanisms proposed in a paper. Overall, our analysis above reinforces the results Dudeney and Walton55 reported from their quantitative study of Treaty Parties’ scientific output from Antarctic research and policy papers submitted to ATCMs. Dudeney and Walton56 conclude that ‘at present the Treaty remains effectively a select “club” dominated by the claimant nations and the former Cold War warriors (the USA and Russia)’. This is certainly also reflected in the tourism debate, which is largely steered by claimant states and the USA, with non-­state actors actively contributing knowledge around this topic and being enrolled in coalitions of Parties willing to work with them.

CONCLUSION Hall’s57 general claim that policy makers and stakeholders contributing to policy-­making processes do not readily acknowledge that tourism and politics are intertwined also holds true for the Antarctic context. However, as Suntikul and Butler58 maintain, the ‘increasing global nature of tourism patterns and tourism-­related enterprises is bringing tourism into the realm of global politics’. Therefore, it is not surprising that tourism, as we illustrate in this chapter, is increasingly enmeshed in the political-­administrative machinery of

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 387

21/12/2016 10:10

388  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Antarctic governance. Globally, tourism is becoming more politicized and is required to operate in an increasingly complex political context and the same can said of Antarctic tourism where tourism becomes both a vehicle for Antarctic politics but also a point of controversy for the ATS. Essentially, it is this dual function of tourism as a matter of concern as well as an economic interest, especially for the Antarctic gateway states, that results in significant challenges for the ATCPs. Decision-­making in the ATS requires consensus, which may entail greater buy-­in from the Parties once a decision has been reached, but which arguably also favours decisions that are ‘convenient’ and acceptable to all decision-­making Parties, that is possibly representing the lowest common denominator rather than forward-­looking regulatory solutions. As a result, the ATCPs tend to default to a piecemeal approach to tourism regulation consisting of largely hortatory regulatory mechanisms. Nonetheless, the ATCPs still consider themselves as the ultimate decision-­makers with regards to Antarctic tourism regulation and, while acknowledging the generally commendable practice of IAATO operators in their attempt to self-­regulate, they lament the fact that in situ management largely rests with IAATO and its members.59 This conundrum impinges on a potentially more strategic and proactive approach to tourism regulation through the ATS by removing the sense of urgency from decision-­making on tourism matters. Despite recognizing a considerable change in the scale and character of engagement with tourism in the ATS as illustrated in this chapter, the discussion around tourism is still dominated by the same state actors, namely the claimant states, the USA and a handful of active ATCPs, while being augmented by ASOC and IAATO as significant non-­state contributors. Considering the growing interest by new players in the ATS to gain ATCP status (for example, Malaysia, Pakistan, Portugal and Mongolia), we may see an even further increase in diverging viewpoints and interests, which might further dilute the tourism discussion and hinder timely decision-­making on future developments in Antarctic tourism. This begs the question of whether we are entering a new phase of political engagement with Antarctic tourism matters. A phase that is characterized by (a) diverse viewpoints; (b) a necessarily strengthened collaboration with other regimes as, for instance, illustrated by the recent adoption of a mandatory International Code for Ships Operating in Polar Waters (Polar Code) by the IMO; (c) the need for increased levels of diplomacy; and (d) a more complex politicization of tourism matters.

NOTES   1. Hall 1994.  2. Beck 1990; 1994; Bertram and Stonehouse 2007; Enzenbacher 1995; 2007; Herr 1996; Liggett 2011; Richardson 1999; Tracey 2001; Vidas 1996.   3. Stewart, Draper, and Johnston 2005.   4. Headland 1994  5. Ibid.   6. Headland 1994; Stonehouse and Snyder 2010.  7. Ibid.   8. Lamers 2009.   9. Liggett 2009. 10. Grenier 2004; Liggett 2009. 11. Lamers 2009. 12. See also WP52 ATCM XXXIII 2010 and WP20 ATCM XXXIV 2011.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 388

21/12/2016 10:10

The changing face of political engagement  389 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Lamers 2009; Liggett 2011. Stewart and Draper 2008. Republic of Liberia 2009. Lamers, 2009. Enzenbacher 1993; Headland 1992; 1994; 2005; Reich 1980. Seven states (Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway and the UK) have territorial claims to parts of the Antarctic. Three of these claims, the Argentine, Chilean and British claims, overlap in the Antarctic Peninsula region. We acknowledge that the resulting governance arrangement is as much a product of its time – the Cold War era – as it is a reflection of the unique characteristics of the Antarctic itself and human engagement with the continent, including the geopolitical tensions around the contentious issue of sovereignty. The Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (1980) forms an exception with regard to its geographical reach, which extends to the Antarctic convergence. Haase, Lamers, and Amelung 2009. Lamers 2009. Working Papers are typically translated into the four ATS languages and are ‘formative’ papers in the ATS’s policy processes. They are tabled for discussion and generally incite action. Information Papers are not usually translated and are not always discussed in plenary. We acknowledge that there are four types of meeting documents recognized in the Rules of Procedure. Working and Information Papers (WPs and IPs) are supplemented by Background Papers (out of a total of 149 BPs, five are on tourism) and Secretariat Papers (out of a total of 158 SPs, seven are on tourism – these are mostly papers referring to agenda items or are overviews of tourism papers presented). Furthermore, there are also ‘Additional Documents’ (out of a total of 123 ADs, twelve are on tourism), which provide additional information, such as the full notes provided by presentations by experts in plenary (for example, the SCAR science lecture, or a presentation by the International Hydrographic Organization). However, due to the relatively small number of BPs, SPs and ADs and their, so far, minimal impact on the policy discussions, we chose to analyse WPs and IPs only. Reich 1980. The Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora (1964); the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals (1972); the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (1980); and the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities (1988). Bastmeijer and Roura 2004; Cessford 1997; Johnson and Kriwoken 2007; Murray and Jabour 2004. Bauer 2010. UNWTO 1995, 12. Hall 1994, 88. Herr 1996. Herr 1996, 207. Herr 1996. Due to their strong political and territorial affiliations with Antarctica, the claimant states have been traditionally the most active participants in ATS politics. The five claimant states shaping the early tourism discussions are all gateway states to the Antarctic with tourism operators passing through their ports (Ushuaia in Argentina, Punta Arenas in Chile, Hobart in Australia, Lyttelton and Bluff in New Zealand and Stanley in the Falkland Islands/Malvinas, a British overseas territory). France and Norway are also claimant states and took an early interest in tourism, contributing to the discussions primarily with joint papers with the other claimant states. Similarly, South Africa which has sovereignty over some sub-­ Antarctic islands, is another gateway state (Cape Town serves as a gateway to Dronning Maud Land) which naturally took an interest in tourism development. We cannot say with certainty why Belgium and Poland made early contributions to the tourism discussion in the ATCM, but we believe that Poland wanted to show its willingness to contribute to the ATCMs after becoming a signatory state in 1961 (the Working Paper on Tourism submitted by Poland was only its fourth paper submission to the ATCMs), while Belgium may have been asked as an original and active signatory state to contribute to jointly authored papers on tourism. Herr 1996. Beck 1994. Herr 1996. According to Herr (1996, 217), the ‘apparently anomalous support by Chile for the French position on a tourism annex’ could be explained by ‘[p]ersonalities (involved in negotiations at the time) rather than national interest’ (ibid). Bastmeijer 2003. Richardson 1999. Roura 2011. US-­based non-­profit organization with a focus on science and education that was established in 1987. Its

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 389

21/12/2016 10:10

390  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica main scientific project is the Antarctic Site Inventory, which involves the collection of biological and physical baseline data on a wide range of sites in the Antarctic Peninsula. Data collection for the Antarctic Site Inventory began in 1994 and is ongoing (see www.oceanites.org). 42. An International Code for Ships Operating in Polar Waters (Polar Code) was adopted by the IMO in late 2014 and is expected to enter into force in January 2017. 43. This unusual coalition of a claimant state, a non-­claimant state and an NGO appears to be the result of a shared vision of a few key individual actors within these groups, and the familiarity of these individuals with each other’s work, and their willingness and ability to collaborate. 44. See WP51 (ATCM XXXI, 2008) and WP10 (ATCM XXXII, 2009) submitted by the UK; IP03 (2009 ATME on Ship-­borne Tourism), IP53 (ATCM XXXII, 2009) and IP80 (ATCM XXXIII, 2010) submitted by ASOC; and WP 21 (ATCM XXXIV, 2011) submitted by the Netherlands. 45. We hasten to add that the negotiation of the Protocol, along with the abandonment of the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities (CRAMRA) and an opening up of the ATS to new members in the 1980s when eighteen new Parties joined the ATS, served to diffuse tensions around the legitimacy of ATS governance over the Antarctic (Stokke and Vidas 1996; Tracey 2001) when the ‘Question of Antarctica was famously brought up in the UN General Assembly (see UN Resolution 38/77 of 15 December 1983) and followed by a detailed study on Antarctica that also compiled perspectives on Antarctic governance from 54 UN Member States. 46. Hemmings 2014. 47. Thirty-­seven visitor sites are currently subject to site-­specific guidelines for visitors. 48. Neither of these two Measures is effective yet. 49. The total number of regulatory mechanisms shown includes all recommendations, resolutions, measures and decisions that have been adopted by ATCMs over the last 50 years. Figure 24.5 compares the total number of regulatory mechanisms with the number of mechanisms specifically focused on tourism matters and tourism-­related Working Papers submitted in that timeframe. The overall number of regulatory mechanisms in 1966 is artificially high due to the designation of 15 Specially Protected Areas in accordance with Annex b of the Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora, which were adopted in 1964. 50. Fedchuk 2008. 51. Ibid. 52. Liggett 2009. 53. Here, only the USA and the UK stand out with nine jointly authored Information Papers on tourism. 54. Argentina with Ushuaia and the UK with Stanley in the Falkland Islands/Malvinas. 55. Dudeney and Walton 2012. 56. Dudeney and Walton 2012, 7. 57. Hall 1994. 58. Suntikul and Butler 2009, 1. 59. Liggett 2009.

REFERENCES Bastmeijer, K. 2003. The Antarctic Environmental Protocol and its Domestic Legal Implementation (Vol. 65). The Hague, London and New York: Kluwer Law International. Bastmeijer, K. and Roura, R. 2004. Regulating Antarctic Tourism and the Precautionary Principle. The American Journal of International Law, 98(4): 763–81. Bauer, T.G. 2010. Politics on Ice: Tourism in Antarctica. Pages 208–18 in R. Butler and W. Suntikul (eds), Tourism and Political Change. Oxford: Goodfellow Publishers. Bauer, T.G. 2001. Tourism in the Antarctic: Opportunities, Constraints, and Future Prospects. New York: Haworth Press. Beck, P.J. 1990. Regulating one of the last tourism frontiers: Antarctica. Applied Geography, 10(4): 243–356. Beck, P.J. 1994. Managing Antarctic tourism: A front-­burner issue. Annals of Tourism Research, 21(2): 375–86. Bertram, E. and Stonehouse, B. 2007. Tourism management for Antarctica. Pages 285–309 in J. Snyder and B. Stonehouse (eds), Prospects for Polar Tourism. Oxfordshire, Cambridge, MA: CABI Publications. Cessford, G. 1997. Antarctic tourism: a frontier for wilderness management. International Journal of Wilderness, 3(3): 7–11. Dudeney, J.R. and Walton, D.W.H. 2012. Leadership in politics and science within the Antarctic Treaty. Polar Research, 31(11075): 1–9. Enzenbacher, D.J. 1993. Tourists in Antarctica: numbers and trends. Tourism Management, 14(2): 143–6.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 390

21/12/2016 10:10

The changing face of political engagement  391 Enzenbacher, D.J. 1995. The regulation of Antarctic tourism. Pages 179–215 in C.M. Hall and M.E. Johnston (eds), Polar Tourism: Tourism in the Arctic and Antarctic Regions. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Enzenbacher, D.J. 2007. Antarctic tourism policy-­making: current challenges and future prospects. Pages 155–89 in G. Triggs and A. Riddell (eds), Antarctica: Legal and Environmental Challenges for the Future. London: The British Institute of International and Comparative Law. Fedchuk, A.P. 2008. Dynamics of Antarctic tourism at Faraday/Vernadsky Staion (1968–2008). Український Антарктичний Журнал, 6(7): 226–241. Grenier, A. 2004. The Nature of Nature Tourism. Unpub. PhD thesis. Rovaniemi, Finland: University of Lapland. Haase, D., Lamers, M. and Amelung, B. 2009. Heading into uncharted territory? Exploring the institutional robustness of self-­regulation in the Antarctic tourism sector. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 17(4): 411–30. Hall, C.M. 1994. Tourism and Politics: Policy, Power, and Place. Chichester, New York: John Wiley & Sons. Headland, R.K. 1992. Chronological List of Antarctic Expeditions and Related Historical Events. Cambridge: Scott Polar Research Institute/Cambridge University Press. Headland, R.K. 1994. Historical development of Antarctic tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 21(2): 269–80. Headland, R.K. 2005. Chronological List of Antarctic Expeditions and Related Historical Events. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hemmings, A.D. 2014. Rights, expectations and global equity: re-­justifying the Antarctic Treaty System for the 21st century. Pages 55–73 in R.C. Powell and K. Dodds (eds), Polar Geopolitics? Knowledges, Resources and Legal Regimes. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Herr, R.A. 1996. The regulation of Antarctic tourism: a study in regime effectiveness. Pages 203–23 in O.S. Stokke and D. Vidas (eds), Governing the Antarctic: the Effectiveness and Legitimacy of the Antarctic Treaty System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, M.P. and Kriwoken, L.K. 2007. Emerging issues of Australian Antarctic Tourism: legal and policy directions. Pages 85–99 in L.K. Kriwoken, J. Jabour and A.D. Hemmings (eds), Looking South: Australia’s Antarctic Agenda. Sydney, N.S.W.: Federation Press. Lamers, M. 2009. The Future of Tourism in Antarctica: Challenges for Sustainability. Maastricht: Universitaire Pers Maastricht. Liggett, D. 2011. From frozen continent to tourism hotspot? Five decades of Antarctic tourism development and management, and a glimpse into the future. Tourism Management, 32: 357–66. Liggett, D.H. 2009. Tourism in the Antarctic: Modi Operandi and Regulatory Effectiveness. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller. Murray, C. and Jabour, J. 2004. Independent expeditions and Antarctic tourism policy. Polar Record, 40(215): 309–17. Orams, M. 2010. Polar yacht cruising. Pages 13–24 in M. Lück, P.T. Maher and E.J. Stewart. (eds), Cruise Tourism in Polar Regions: Promoting Environmental and Social Sustainability? London: Earthscan. Reich, R.J. 1980. The development of Antarctic tourism. Polar Record, 20(126): 203–14. Republic of Liberia. 2009. Report of investigation in the matter of the sinking of passenger vessel Explorer (O.N. 8485) 23 November 2007 in the Bransfield Strait near the South Shetland Islands. Monrovia, Liberia: Bureau of Maritime Affairs. Richardson, M.G. 1999. Regulating tourism in the Antarctic: issues of environment and jurisdiction. Antarctic Project Report (Fridtjof Nansen Institute), 2/99: 1–19. Roura, R. 2011. The Footprint of Polar Tourism: Tourist Behaviour at Cultural Heritage Sites in Antarctica and Svalbard (Vol. 7). Groningen, The Netherlands: Arctic Centre, University of Groningen. Stewart, E.J., Draper, D. and Johnston, M.E. 2005. A review of tourism research in the polar regions. Arctic, 58(4): 383–94. Stokke, O.S. and Vidas, D. (eds) 1996. Governing the Antarctic. The Effectiveness and Legitimacy of the Antarctic Treaty System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stonehouse, B. and Snyder, J. 2010. Polar Tourism: An Environmental Perspective. Bristol: Channel View Publications. Suntikul, W. and Butler, R. 2010. Introduction. Pages 1–7 in R. Butler and W. Suntikul (eds), Tourism and Political Change. Oxford: Goodfellow Publishers. Tracey, P.J. 2001. Managing Antarctic Tourism. Unpub. PhD thesis. Hobart, Tasmania, Australia: The University of Tasmania. UNWTO 1995. Concepts, Definitions and Classifications for Tourism Statistics. Technical Manual 1. Madrid: World Tourism Organisation. Vidas, D. 1996. The legitimacy of the Antarctic tourism regime. Pages 294–320 in O. S. Stokke and D. Vidas (eds), Governing the Antarctic: The Effectiveness and Legitimacy of the Antarctic Treaty System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 391

21/12/2016 10:10

25.  Southern Ocean search and rescue: platforms and procedures Julia Jabour

INTRODUCTION Rescue of persons in distress at sea is both a maritime tradition and a legal obligation derived from a number of specific international law conventions including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS),1 the International Convention for Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS)2 and the International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue (SAR Convention).3 The last prescribes a formal process for state collaboration and response to SAR emergencies to minimize costs and maximize efficiencies. The world is divided into SAR regions and states are obliged to cooperate in coordinating responses in their area of responsibility, and in helping in other regions when appropriate. This generally works well and it is not normally politicized.4 Cooperation is nowhere more necessary and evident than in the Antarctic. SAR assets are not normally pre-­positioned in the Southern Ocean in the same way that they might be domestically (for example, the coastguard). The exception is a collaborative agreement between Chile and Argentina, which will be discussed later. When incidents occur, SAR response is expensive and coordination relies heavily on the assistance of opportune assets, such as vessels of national operators being diverted from their normal operations, which might include scientific research, fisheries enforcement or base resupply vessels. Non-­government vessels in the SAR emergency location will also be tasked with assisting if they are the best located of the most capable responders. Securing the cooperation of neighbouring states and other operators is, therefore, a vital element of a state’s ability to carry out SAR responsibilities in the Southern Ocean. Maritime SAR is conducted as a community service and there is little chance of cost recovery from the initiator of the distress, particularly if there is no malicious intent involved (for example, through the making of hoax calls or the mischievous activation of distress signals). Southern Ocean SAR emergencies generally occur during the austral summer when the volume of shipping increases. Problems sometimes involve ships unsuitable for Antarctic conditions but are operating in the region; the complexities and sensitivities of cooperation among national operators; inadequate quality and quantity of charts; and inadequate or misunderstood information about ice forecasting, weather and other operating conditions. The International Maritime Organization’s mandatory International Code of Safety for Ships Operating in Polar Waters (the Polar Code),5 which will soon be implemented in its first phase, will go some way towards assisting all SAR efforts in the Southern Ocean by prescribing classes of ships and where they can travel (related to the kinds of hazards they might encounter). However the Polar Code in the first instance will only apply to 392

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 392

21/12/2016 10:10

Southern Ocean search and rescue  393 vessels to which SOLAS applies, that is, vessels on international voyages, and not fishing vessels or vessels on government service. Many governments’ operating platforms in the Southern Ocean are under-­resourced to meet their SAR obligations and their success is often contingent upon the serendipitous presence of other vessels in their SAR zone. The cost of diverting these vessels to aid SAR activities is increasing and the tradition of selfless rescue of persons in distress at sea is increasingly undertaken with resentment. This chapter will explore the nuances of Southern Ocean search and rescue. It begins by briefly outlining the status of the Southern Ocean and the shipping activities that occur there. There are legally defined areas of SAR responsibility and these will be discussed using some recent incidents as case studies to highlight the difficulties of meeting obligations in a safe and efficient manner. The chapter will conclude with a preview of the Polar Code and its uneven application to Antarctic-­bound vessels, speculating on what differences the Polar Code might make to SAR in the Southern Ocean.

THE SOUTHERN OCEAN The Southern Ocean is a vast body of water that surrounds the Antarctic continent. It is impossible to put a single meaningful figure on its dimensions, since there are different boundaries applied for different purposes – political, commercial, legal and scientific. The legal status of the Southern Ocean is also difficult to quantify, since it depends on the persons to whom the legal status is to apply. To simplify characterization of the Southern Ocean for the purposes of this chapter on search and rescue, it is useful to rely on the accepted definition from the Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs (COMNAP), since it is COMNAP’s responsibility to represent the interests of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties (ATCPs) that have active national Antarctic programmes. COMNAP describes SAR coverage thus: there are ‘five maritime Search and Rescue Regions [SRRs; Figure 25.1] that extend all the way South to the Antarctic coast and together cover all the region’s navigable seas and five aeronautical SRRs that extend all the way South to the geographic pole and together cover all of the region’s airspace’.6 In relation to the Southern Ocean, ice-­breaking ships can only travel safely a certain distance into the ice before impenetrable barriers of land-­fast or thick sea ice block their paths. In that event, other platforms such as over-­ice vehicles or aircraft (helicopters or fixed-­wing) are required to continue over-­ice or over-­continent search and rescue missions.7 COMNAP is the logistics expert in this regard. The northern boundary of the Southern Ocean is variously described as the limit of the Antarctic Convergence, which roughly corresponds to the northern boundary of the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).8 The legal extent of the Antarctic Treaty9 is south of 60º South and the legal extent of the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty10 is south of 60º South, and dependent and associated ecosystems. Given these disparate boundaries, how is ­jurisdiction determined? It is complicated. Article IV of the Antarctic Treaty notes that while the Treaty is in force, nothing anybody does will change the status quo ante of claims or rights to claim, leaving them in legal hiatus until some unspecified time in the future. Outside of this

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 393

21/12/2016 10:10

394  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica interpretation of Article IV, each Antarctic claimant would normally consider itself to be a coastal state, thereby activating the attribute of the right to proclaim maritime zones under UNCLOS. Furthermore, Article VI outlines the Treaty’s area of application and notes that nothing in the Treaty affects or prejudices the exercise of rights with respect to the high seas south of 60º South under international law. This leaves us with states with a coastline, which cannot exercise jurisdiction against anyone other than their own nationals, and must respect the preservation of high seas rights. The conclusion is that the waters surrounding the Antarctic continent – here called the Southern Ocean – are, in fact, high seas. That is, they are areas beyond national jurisdiction under Part VII of UNCLOS. Whether or not the maritime zones extending from territorial claims are to be considered under national jurisdiction is a moot point: recognition of territorial and marine areas is discretionary on the part of each Contracting Party to the Antarctic Treaty and recognition plays little practical role in Southern Ocean SAR. It might, however, influence behaviour in the case of the Antarctic Peninsula, for example, where claims overlap and SAR takes on political dimensions, or between claimants and non-­claimants. Finally, all vessels operating in the Southern Ocean are under the jurisdiction of their flag state, with the associated responsibilities outlined in UNCLOS, but not all vessels are flagged to Antarctic Treaty or CCAMLR parties.11

SOUTHERN OCEAN ACTIVITIES The Southern Ocean fleet comprises those vessels operated by national Antarctic programmes (as reported to COMNAP12 or the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat through exchanged information,13 for example), tourism companies (as reported to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators, IAATO14), fishing companies (as reported to CCAMLR15 and/or flag states) and quasi-­military organizations (fisheries inspection vessels, for example). Other ships are either in transit or in the region for the purposes of environmental activism, covert or illegal activities, such as unlicensed fishing. These miscellaneous vessels are unlikely to be reported unless they voluntarily join one of the ship-­reporting systems. Since there is no obligation anywhere for a vessel in an SRR to notify the responsible state of its presence, and in the Antarctic they are not travelling through what might otherwise be that state’s sovereign waters, it is difficult to quantify the fleet.16 Under SOLAS, however, most authentic vessels operating in the Southern Ocean would be required to transmit an automatic identification system (AIS) signal. Within the Antarctic legal regime there have been some major advances towards ensuring the safety of vessels in the Southern Ocean and some rather significant delays. Mitigating risk and preventing accidents are paramount compared to the alternative of search, rescue and recovery in the isolated, hostile and unpredictable Southern Ocean. The major advances have been the establishment of COMNAP’s ship position reporting scheme (albeit voluntary); continued encouragement of industry best-­practice carried out by IAATO and its schemes of schedule coordination and emergency response ­contingencies; the ATCM’s encouragement of the IMO Polar Code; and the various ATCM and CCAMLR resolutions on safety of navigation for government, tourist and non-­governmental and fishing vessels.17

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 394

21/12/2016 10:10

Southern Ocean search and rescue  395 One of the disappointments has been the failure (as of February 2016) of Measure 4 (2004) to enter into force. Measure 4 spells out the requirements for tourism and non-­ governmental operators to hold emergency search and rescue insurance when venturing south of 60° South latitude and to have emergency contingency plans in place that do not impose on national operators without their prior approval.18 Another disappointment is the delay in applying the Polar Code to fishing vessels. These frustrations add to the already considerable challenge of SAR and, importantly, of protecting the marine environment from human-­induced harm from shipping accidents. They will be discussed in more detail later as lessons from the case studies.

SOUTHERN OCEAN SAR RESPONSIBILITIES Responsibility for Southern Ocean SAR is derived from the SAR Convention to which the Southern Ocean rim states – Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina and South Africa – are parties. They are also each original ATCPs and CCAMLR Member states with longstanding experience in Antarctic operations. Their legal obligations under the SAR Convention involve establishing and funding maritime and aeronautical rescue coordination centres (RCCs) capable of coordinating and organizing search and rescue operations in their SAR region (Figure 25.1).

Source:  COMNAP 2008.

Figure 25.1  Southern Ocean SAR areas of responsibility

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 395

21/12/2016 10:10

396  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica The five Antarctic SAR regions correspond with five geographical NAVAREAs, established under the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), within which particular governments are responsible for navigation and weather alerts. The Maritime Safety Authority of Australia and the Hydrographic Offices of New Zealand, Chile, Argentina and South Africa provide information of relevance to marine RCCs (or MRCCs – maritime rescue coordination centres) in a distress situation.19 The SAR Convention makes clear that the delimitation of the boundaries of SAR regions ‘is not related to and shall not prejudice the delimitation of any boundary between States’ and this is an important point in the context of the sovereign-­neutral Antarctic.20 It also makes clear that ‘Parties shall ensure that assistance be provided to any person in distress at sea. They shall do so regardless of the nationality or status of such a person or the circumstances in which that person is found.’21 This has the potential to be in conflict with Measure 4 (2004) and will be discussed later. The principal MRCCs are located in Canberra, Australia; Wellington, New Zealand; Punta Arenas, Chile; Ushuaia, Argentina; and Cape Town, South Africa, where aeronautical, maritime or joint coordination takes place. SAR and the ATCM Discussion and decisions about Southern Ocean SAR are conducted through the Operations Working Group of the ATCM, and have been on the agenda since the first meeting in 1961. The key to understanding the complexity of Southern Ocean SAR lies in the obligation of the state with prime responsibility for SAR to coordinate, at the least, a response to a distress signal. This obligation does not necessarily mean that state must use its own assets, and in the Antarctic the reason for this becomes evident. Australia, New Zealand and South Africa have no pre-­positioned assets in the Southern Ocean for the purposes of SAR, because of a lack of capacity, and because of the distances and alternative priority use of military assets. However both Chile and Argentina do, which is useful, since their area of operation coincides with the highest concentration of maritime traffic. Since 1998, joint Chilean–Argentinean naval patrols (Patrulla Antártica Naval Combinada) operate in the vicinity of Drake Passage and the Antarctic Peninsula.22 It is reported that these patrols are ‘equipped and trained for rescue and environmental ­protection operations’ and that they undertake regular exercises.23 The ATCPs have been working for a number of years to strengthen their understanding of SAR requirements and capabilities, and to increase cooperation between MRCCs and all states operating in the Antarctic, in light of increased maritime traffic. COMNAP held two SAR workshops, in 2008 and 2009, which were reported to ATCMs in subsequent years and updated in 2013.24 As a consequence, the ATCPs established an information portal within the Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) of the Secretariat to catalogue operating state SAR asset capacity.25 Although not yet fully populated with data, it will in time provide a useful amount of material to the parties. In the meantime, a 2012 ATCM Resolution26 established an ad hoc Special Working Group on SAR to be convened during the 2013 ATCM in Brussels to discuss, among other things, risk assessment and contingency planning, international coordination, and the identification of best practice that should be implemented as a means of improving

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 396

21/12/2016 10:10

Southern Ocean search and rescue  397 SAR coordination and implementation. Critical information was tabled in Brussels at this special working group meeting to inform the ATCM of the current arrangements existing within and between the five Southern Ocean rim states.27 Australia Australian government agencies (the Australian Maritime Safety Authority and the Australian Antarctic Division) have a memorandum of understanding on Antarctic SAR. Because there are a number of different state operators with stations in the part of East Antarctica covered by Australia’s SRR, these authorities have collected information on all stations and field activities, vessels and aircraft and their schedules, and contact lists that are critical in the coordination and conduct of a SAR response. Australia participates in joint SAR exercises and information exchange. There is very little tourism to East Antarctica, but there is a considerable amount of fishing activity and also environmental protest campaigning targeting Japanese whaling activities. New Zealand The national Antarctic programmes of New Zealand, the United States, Italy and South Korea all operate within the NZ SRR and mutually agreed operating principles have been adopted, including the exchange of information on ship and aircraft movements. A Joint Antarctic SAR Team provides SAR coverage for the Ross Island region where McMurdo (USA) and Scott Base (NZ) are located, and into the areas inland en route to places such as South Pole station (USA) and Concordia (Dome C, Italy and France). Because there is a set of large ice runways in the vicinity of McMurdo station (Williams Field), the US Antarctic Program provides weather forecasting and acts as the Emergency Operations Centre in the event of a SAR response. As with the Australian SRR, there is some tourism in the NZ SRR, as well as vessels fishing and NGO activists campaigning there. Chile and Argentina While there is no formal SAR agreement between Chile and Argentina, which share SAR coordination responsibilities, there is, as mentioned, a combined naval patrol. Because their areas of responsibility have the highest level of maritime (and air) traffic in Antarctica (tourist, national operators and fishing vessels), collaboration and information exchange on assets, ship schedules and contacts are essential. Argentina has two helicopters equipped to conduct SAR missions, operating out of Ushuaia. Chile has an emergency SAR air capability, operating out of Punta Arenas to King George Island near the Antarctic Peninsula. Both countries are active participants in all aspects of SAR discussions in other forums, such as the IMO. Argentina also conducts joint exchanges of plans and exercises with its SAR neighbour, South Africa. South Africa As well as a regular shipping route through the port of Cape Town, there is an air service from Cape Town that operates into the South African SRR – the Dronning Maud

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 397

21/12/2016 10:10

398  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Land Air Network (DROMLAN). DROMLAN was the initiative of a consortium of Antarctic operators with bases in the region: Belgium, Finland, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, South Africa, Sweden and the United Kingdom. In a formal memorandum of understanding between the relevant South African authorities, the South African scientific base, SANAE IV, is designated as the Regional RCC. All operators in the region share information, including ship and aircraft movements, and the locations of aviation fuel depots. Because this area is the second most remote after East Antarctica, all operators collaborate with the South African MRCC to coordinate all information crucial to a SAR response, including weather information and the availability of medical services. Very little tourism or other NGO activity is conducted within South Africa’s SRR, but what does occur is primarily airborne rather than ship-­based. There are fishing grounds within the region. In addition to this information, COMNAP tabled details of its own resources to support the five MRCCs. COMNAP resources include: ●

a Telecommunications Operator’s Manual, with contact information for stations, vessels, and responsible officers; ●● a Flight Information Manual, with information on ‘where aircraft operate, on Primary and Secondary Air Information Stations (AIS), ships carrying helicopters, ground facilities including medical, cargo and fuel facilities (types or grades) and rescue equipment’; and ● a Ship Position Reporting System, which has ‘contact information on national Antarctic program vessels operating below 60º South in the Antarctic summer season and displays positioning and other optional information such as heading, observations, number of persons, doctors and helicopters on board’.28 COMNAP also has an electronic Accident, Incident and Near-­Miss Reporting System. Understanding the circumstances surrounding events such as these, and analyzing the responses assists COMNAP members with future operational procedures and the MRCCs with response planning. Finally, COMNAP has a Safety Expert Group, which runs regular SAR workshops, and a Shipping Expert Group, to help inform operators about matters of shipping safety and logistics From the 2013 Special Working Group on SAR, the ATCM adopted Resolution 4 (2013), which calls for continued collaboration, commitment to share information and cooperation.29 COMNAP now has a members-­only SAR portal that facilitates the sharing of SAR-­related information between all Members and the five MRCCs. COMNAP noted at the time that a number of informal and formal bilateral agreements existed between adjacent SRR states; that IAATO had agreed to make information on its member vessels (including emergency assets) and their itineraries available to the MRCCs of each of the five states; and in an important step forward, CCAMLR offered to make its vessel monitoring system (VMS) data available to MRCCs for the purposes of SAR response (covered in the next section).30 A small amount of this information is now also publicly available through the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat’s EIES database on search and rescue, which has begun to list operators and their stations, vessels and aircraft.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 398

21/12/2016 10:10

Southern Ocean search and rescue  399 Measure 4 (2004) At the 2004 ATCM in Cape Town the Consultative Parties agreed on a legally binding measure (Measure 4) requiring tourism and non-­governmental operators to carry adequate insurance for emergency search and rescue.31 The Measure does not apply to fishing vessels. It was adopted by consensus in 2004, but twelve years on it is still not in force. At the time there were twenty-­seven Consultative Parties and to enter into force, Measure 4 requires the approval of all. Currently there are only fourteen approvals.32 Measure 4 is seemingly well intentioned, attempting to promote best practice tourism and non-­governmental activities in the Antarctic. It requires appropriate contingency plans and sufficient arrangements for health and safety, search and rescue, and medical care and evacuation to be in place prior to the commencement of an activity – which must not rely on support from other operators or national programmes without their express written agreement. Furthermore, it requires adequate insurance or other arrangements in place to cover any costs associated with SAR and medical care and evacuation. It was argued at the time that such requirements might compromise the community service principles of the search, rescue and recovery of people in distress at sea embodied in the SAR Convention.33 It is possible the delay in its entry in force is partly a consequence of this conundrum between desiring best practice, requiring a search and rescue safety net and being obliged to provide a SAR service irrespective of the circumstances. It is worthy of note that Australia, New Zealand, Chile and South Africa have all ratified Measure 4 domestically, but in Australia’s case, it has decided not to implement its legislation until Measure 4 is fully in force for all Consultative Parties.34 SAR and CCAMLR One of the few commercial activities in the Southern Ocean is fishing. Each year a number of vessels are licensed by CCAMLR members to fish for species such as toothfish and krill in various locations offshore from the Antarctic continent and further north into the warmer sub-­Antarctic waters. A number of recent SAR incidents have involved fishing vessels, and lives have been lost. CCAMLR has been unwilling to prescribe specific standards of vessel safety through mandatory Conservation Measures. However, it has adopted by consensus a number of non-­binding resolutions that clearly demonstrate member concerns over the hazardous occupation of fishing in the Southern Ocean. As relatively ineffective as they may be as mitigation measures rather than rules of operation, these resolutions do paint a picture of the members’ attention to the matter. For example, Resolution 20/XXII (2003) urges members to license only vessels rated to the ice classification ICE-­1C (Det Norske Veritas) to fish in the high latitude fisheries south of 60º South and off the Antarctic continent.35 CCAMLR has also adopted a resolution urging members to voluntarily provide ‘contact details and other relevant information related to fishing vessels under their flag to the appropriate MRCC, in advance of vessels entering the Convention Area’.36 Finally, there are resolutions on safety onboard fishing vessels, adopted in 2004 and 2012. The first urges members to promote the safety of persons through measures such as appropriate training and equipment.37 The second encourages members to support the adoption of the Polar Code (even though it will not initially apply to fishing vessels); to consider

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 399

21/12/2016 10:10

400  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica ratifying the Cape Town Agreement;38 and to continue to enhance the safety standards of their licensed fishing vessels. A number of sensitivities were revealed when CCAMLR members discussed whether to permit the use of VMS data in SAR activities. VMS is a satellite-­linked monitoring system that is mandatory on licensed fishing vessels in the CCAMLR area. VMS data are beamed to the flag state of the fishing vessel and can be passed on to the CCAMLR Secretariat. As identified in the ATCM Special Working Group on SAR, this would be valuable information in SAR activities, if for no other reason than it would help to characterize the profile of the fleet of possible responders in the Southern Ocean. When this matter was raised in the CCAMLR Standing Committee on Inspection and Compliance meeting in 2013, a number of conditions were put on the table for consideration: ●

only competent MRCCs would be the recipients of information released; the release of CCAMLR VMS information would only be in relation to a specific emergency incident identified by a competent MRCC; ●● the release of CCAMLR VMS information would be subject to the terms of an arrangement (Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)) between the Secretariat and the MRCCs, to be approved by the Commission; ●● the release of CCAMLR VMS information would be restricted to the position for vessels reporting to CCAMLR’s VMS within 500 nautical miles of the emergency incident; ●● information provided would be subject to CCAMLR’s VMS data confidentiality rules and provisions within CCAMLR conservation measures; and ● MRCCs would be required to commit to the destruction of any information provided 3 months after the provision of that information.39 ●●

After further discussion, including consideration of a draft MOU, an amendment to existing Conservation Measure 10-­04 (2013) was approved, permitting CCAMLR’s VMS data to be passed to MRCCs strictly for the purposes of ‘supporting search and rescue activities undertaken by a competent Maritime Rescue Coordination Center (MRCC) subject to the terms of an MOU or Arrangement between the CCAMLR Secretariat and the competent MRCC’.40 All of the data on shipping movements that are now, or will become, available to the five MRCCs are a significant improvement, especially important given the increased ship traffic in the Antarctic and the changing operating conditions. The IMO’s Polar Code is also generally considered to be a positive step towards enhanced safety and environmental protection in the Antarctic, even though in its first phase it will not apply to certain classes of vessels, including fishing vessels, yachts and small commercial ships under 500 GT.

THE POLAR CODE The IMO has developed a mandatory Polar Code to replace its recommendatory guidelines,41 and its earlier resolutions on safety in polar waters.42 The Code will become

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 400

21/12/2016 10:10

Southern Ocean search and rescue  401 mandatory, commencing on 1 January 2017 for new vessels or after the first survey (after that date) for existing vessels, through amendments to two existing conventions. The first, SOLAS, will be amended to bring into force the matters in the Code that relate to safety. The second, MARPOL,43 will implement provisions relating to the environment. Together, signatories to these two conventions represent about 98 per cent of world shipping tonnage – providing the Antarctic region with regulations broader than could have been achieved if the Code had been developed as an Antarctic-­specific, in-­house Measure by the ATCPs alone. In summary, the Code applies to every vessel on an international voyage that is subject to SOLAS and MARPOL.44 As mentioned, this excludes fishing vessels, yachts and small commercial ships under 500 GT, and vessels on government service. Each vessel that is on a voyage in whole or in part in polar waters shall be ‘certified’ and be operated according to an approved operation manual. The word ‘shall’ indicates that this is not a discretionary matter. Polar Ship Certificates will be issued by flag states (or classification societies acting on their behalf) following compliance inspections and surveys. Certified vessels should avoid ice and temperatures below their operating limitations, but when this is not possible or practicable, the Polar Water Operational Manual outlines risk-­based procedures crew should follow to keep the vessel safe. Operating hazards were identified as relating to ice conditions, temperature, light, remoteness, weather, forecasting and the efficacy of charts. The Code nominates three categories of ships, with classes determined in relation to the ice conditions they might encounter and their capacity to operate effectively and safely: ●

Category A – ships designed for operation in polar waters at least in medium ­first-­year ice, which may include old ice inclusions; ●● Category B – a ship not included in Category A, designed for operation in polar waters in at least thin first-­year ice, which may include old ice inclusions; and ● Category C – a ship designed to operate in open water or in ice conditions less severe than those included in Categories A and B.45 SOLAS ships operating in the Southern Ocean will fall into one of these three categories. Itineraries for routes to, from and around the continent will therefore become contingent upon the ship’s authorisation to operate in designated ice conditions. This does not mean that accidents will necessarily be prevented, but, providing the Code is well applied by the flag states, it should lead to a reduction.

CASE STUDIES AND DISCUSSION The two case studies presented here highlight the difficulties with Southern Ocean SAR. The first relates to the tourist vessel, Akademik Shokalskiy, which became beset in ice in Australia’s maritime SRR in the summer of 2013/2014 and involved a multinational search and rescue effort, without loss of life. The second relates to the sinking and subsequent loss of twenty-­one lives from Insung No. 1 – a South Korean vessel fishing in the Ross Sea region. Both incidents made news around the world. Both ­incidents also raise important questions in relation to Southern Ocean SAR:

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 401

21/12/2016 10:10

402  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica ● ●●

Can SAR response costs be recovered from an authorized activity? If the Polar Code had been in force would it have made any difference in either of these two incidents?

Akademik Shokalskiy The Australasian Antarctic Expedition 2013–14 (AAE) was a privately funded trip organized by the University of New South Wales, with assistance from an experienced expedition leader in Australia. Its stated purpose was to retrace the steps of Sir Douglas Mawson’s AAE one hundred years before and to conduct scientific research on the way. The AAE comprised academics and ‘volunteer scientists’ who had bought commercial berths. The AAE applied for permits to visit sites in East Antarctica, and submitted an environmental evaluation of the trip. Permits were granted and the evaluation approved by the Australian Antarctic Division. It did not, however, authorize the AAE’s scientific programme. The ice-­strengthened, Russian-­flagged Akademik Shokalskiy was chartered for the expedition and the vessel departed Bluff, New Zealand on 8 December 2013 under the guidance of a highly experienced New Zealand expedition company, Heritage Expeditions. The voyage was uneventful until the ship became beset in ice near Commonwealth Bay in East Antarctica on 24 December. The Master issued a distress alert on the 25th and national Antarctic programme vessels in the vicinity – l’Astrolabe (France) and Xue Long (China) were tasked by the Australian MRCC to assist. The French vessel soon discovered it could not help and departed. The Chinese vessel, however, was able to move closer, but then it too became surrounded by dense pack ice and was unable to move freely. The Aurora Australis (Australia) also arrived in the vicinity, but it could not reach the Akademik Shokalskiy and remained on standby. 46 A decision was made by the Akademik Shokalskiy’s Master to evacuate all ­non-­crew personnel to the Aurora Australis. His decision was based on the pressure being exerted on the ship by the sea ice; icebergs in close proximity (less than 400 metres away) and the resultant pressure ridging that could be seen close by; and the ­fortuitous ­presence of a nearby fast ice surface capable of supporting the landing of a h ­ elicopter.47  Using  a  ­helicopter from the Xue Long, fifty-­two passengers were ­transferred to the Australian vessel, which then departed to continue its resupply of Casey Station. The United States Coast Guard vessel Polar Star, which had been tasked with assisting out of Sydney, was not required as both the Akademik Shokalskiy and the Xue Long were able to free themselves when ice conditions changed rapidly on 7 January.48 The circumstances leading to the incident have been described by the Russian Federation – flag state of the Akademik Shokalskiy – in a short Information Paper to the ATCM in 2014. Russia suggested that the ship owners were ‘misled’ into believing the AAE was supported by the Australian Antarctic Division.49 In addition, it was reported that although the Master was receiving necessary ice information on request via the ship owner in Vladivostok [. . .] Being for the first time in this Antarctic area, the Master has underestimated the possibility of a quick change in the ice ­situation[,] being bound by strict commercial terms of fulfilling the main expedition goal.50

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 402

21/12/2016 10:10

Southern Ocean search and rescue  403 Unconfirmed media reports suggest that this is an accurate picture of the events resulting in the SAR incident, citing extended field trips by the passengers and authorized by the voyage leader as the main reason why the Master was not able to move his vessel earlier, out of harm’s way. In addition, unconfirmed media reports, later corroborated by personal communication, established that the Australian government was investigating avenues through which to recover some of the costs associated with Australia’s SAR activities. These costs included lost scientific opportunities due to the SAR tasking of the Aurora Australis.51 Insung No. 1 On 13 December 2010, the South Korean-­flagged fishing vessel Insung No. 1 sank in the Ross Sea, in the New Zealand maritime SRR. It was reported that of the ten or so fishing vessels working in the area, three other South Korean-­flagged and two New Zealand fishing vessels were tasked with assisting in the search for survivors.52 Having altered its heading to avoid ice, the Insung No. 1 apparently sank only thirty minutes after suffering an inflow of water through the trawl door, and this capsized the vessel.53 With a sea temperature of around 0ºC, survival time was limited and more than half the crew of ­forty-­two South Korean, Chinese, Indonesian and Vietnamese was lost. Five were confirmed dead and sixteen, including the Master and a South Korean fisheries observer, remained missing.54 A Russian CCAMLR observer was also onboard. The Insung No. 1, which was more than 50 metres long and with a capacity greater than 600 tonnes, was built in Japan in 1979. It was operated by the South Korean fishing company, Insung, which is licensed by the South Korean government to fish in CCAMLR waters. Insung No. 1 was fishing in the Ross Sea more than 1,000 nautical miles from New Zealand’s Scott Base in Antarctica when the incident occurred. After about thirty hours, the NZ RCC called off the search, acknowledging that after this period of time in the water there was ‘no reasonable expectation’ of finding any survivors.55 The South Korean Maritime Safety Tribunal investigated and reported on the incident, a summary of which was also provided to CCAMLR in 2011 by the South Korean ­delegation.56 Significant points of concern were raised. For example it was reported that the vessel had been modified for use in polar waters, but that plans submitted and approved did not correspond with the actual configuration of the vessel after its modification.57 In further analysis of the incident, the South Korean Maritime Safety Tribunal decided that in addition to incorrectly stowed fishing gear and the fact that the vessel was underway to new fishing grounds instead of seeking shelter during poor weather ­conditions, the ship lost stability because ●

the trawl and passageway doors, which should have been closed when the vessel was underway, were left open; ●● by changing heading, the captain actually put the vessel in more danger, permitting more water to enter the passageway; ●● the ‘freeing ports’ (scuppers) became submerged once the vessel listed; and ● the water pump used to remove water from the passageway failed. Crew members of the Insung No. 1 either died of a heart attack or hypothermia and a number were entangled in floating fishing gear. The Tribunal criticized the situation

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 403

21/12/2016 10:10

404  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica of inadequate training in emergency evacuation procedures. The fact that there was no common language for the crew and instructions were written in Korean and/or English contributed further to the tragedy.58 The sinking of Insung No. 1 and the loss of so many lives emphasizes the fact that despite having platforms within a reasonable distance (the first fishing vessel to respond was only some 3 nautical miles behind Insung No. 1), Antarctic conditions are such that people can only tolerate the freezing water temperature for minutes before succumbing to either a heart attack or hypothermia. This incident inspired the adoption of CCAMLR Resolution 33/XXX about providing information on vessels to the MRCCs for SAR purposes.

CONCLUSIONS This chapter has described the existence of five maritime search and rescue regions, with their corresponding coordination centres, and the responsibilities they have in relation to, at the very least, the coordination of SAR activities in response to an incident in the Southern Ocean. These obligations are spelled out in the SAR Convention. The Convention is clear that the five SRRs bear no relationship to boundaries of sovereign territory and that rescue of persons in distress at sea is not discretionary. Nevertheless, the ATCPs have adopted, by consensus, a measure (Measure 4/2004) that in effect might exclude rescuing entities that are without insurance, or covered by prior agreements, or it might facilitate the state responsible for that SRR seeking compensation for the out-­ of-­pocket costs associated with a SAR response. If it enters into force, this measure will change the whole complexion of maritime search and rescue in Antarctica. The case of the Akademik Shokalskiy illustrates the point that even if the Polar Code had been in force at the time, and that vessel had been issued with a Polar Ship Certificate, the circumstances that allegedly led to it becoming beset in ice would probably still have occurred and the outcome would be the same. Without the support of Measure 4, and given the long-­standing traditional and legal duty to render assistance to persons in distress at sea in instruments such as LOSC (UN Law of the Sea Convention), SOLAS and the SAR Convention, the Australian government has little chance of recouping its costs from the expedition organizers. Its attempt to do so, along with comments made at the 2014 ATCM, ring alarm bells about some developing attitudes towards Southern Ocean SAR. New Zealand: ‘Requests to operators to respond could be refused . . . if the operators assessed that the mission of the asset was essential to protect the lives of National Antarctic Program personnel.’59 France: ‘. . . while National Antarctic Programmes were often the only resource available to provide SAR . . . this was complicated both by the need to ensure the safety of programme personnel and by the secondary impacts on national research programmes’.60

These statements suggest that there is still some diplomatic work to do to ensure that the SAR response remains the selfless rescue of persons in distress at sea it is intended to be. The case of the sinking of the fishing vessel, Insung No. 1 and the significant loss of

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 404

21/12/2016 10:10

Southern Ocean search and rescue  405 life, on the other hand, illustrates how important it is for the second phase of the Polar Code to be developed quickly to take account of the dangerous operating conditions for fishing vessels. This is even more important given the lack of progress with the ratification of the Cape Town Agreement that brings into force the Torremolinos Protocol on the safety of fishing vessels. No one measure will provide the optimum safety requirements for vessels operating in polar waters. The provisions of the SAR Convention, operationalized by the five MRCCs and supported by strong initiatives on collaboration, cooperation and exchange of information between Antarctic operators – government and non-­governmental – will continue to be enacted in the Southern Ocean, although there are worrying rumbles about continued imposition on national operators. The implementation of the Polar Code might soothe some of these concerns, but until the potential compromises are worked out, the entry into force of Measure 4 seems to be still some way off.

NOTES   1. 10 December 1982, 1833 UNTS 397.   2. As amended by the Protocol of 1988: 1 November 1974, 1184 UNTS 278.   3. 27 April 1979, 1405 UNTS 97. Note also that the search and rescue provisions of the Convention on International Civil Aviation (7 December 1944) Annex 12 also apply to the Antarctic. In addition, arrangements are in place for land-­based SAR. For the purposes of this chapter, however, the focus will be on the SAR Convention and maritime SAR only.   4. Politicization is most likely to occur in cases where, for example, refugees or asylum seekers are involved. Politicization is not a topic covered here.  5. IMO. International Code of Safety for Ships Operating in Polar Waters. Expected date of entry into force for the first phase (that is the SOLAS amendments) is 1 January 2017. IMO. Shipping in Polar Waters. http://www.imo.org/MediaCentre/HotTopics/polar/Pages/default.aspx.   6. COMNAP 2008, paragraph 10.37.   7. COMNAP 2008, paragraph 10.37.   8. 20 May 1980, 19 ILM 837.   9. 1 December 1959, 402 UNTS 71. 10. 14 October 1991, 30 ILM 1455. 11. UNCLOS Articles 91–6. One recent report noted that the registry of 71 per cent of the tourist vessels travelling to Antarctica through the Argentinean port of Ushuaia in the 2013/2014 season was in non-­ Antarctic Treaty Party states. Argentina 2014. 12. COMNAP. Ship Position Reporting System. Information about the system, though not its contents, is publicly available. https://www.comnap.aq/sprs/SitePages/Home.aspx. 13. Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty. Information Exchange. http://www.ats.aq/e/ie.htm. 14. IAATO 2014. 15. CCAMLR. Licensed Vessels. http://www.ccamlr.org/en/compliance/licensed-­vessels. 16. For more information on this topic, see COMNAP 2008, paragraphs 17.68–17.76. 17. See for example COMNAP 2008, especially paragraphs 5.12–5.15 on prevention and risk minimization. 18. For a discussion of this Measure and its implications see Jabour 2007. 19. COMNAP 2008, paragraphs 8.26–8.30. 20. Article 2.1.7. 21. SAR Convention, Article 2.1.10. 22. COMNAP 2008, paragraph 7.24. 23. Chile 2013 (in Spanish) and Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty 2013 (in English), paragraph 215. 24. COMNAP 2013. 25. Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty. Electronic Information Exchange System. Search and Rescue Information Complete List. http://eies.ats.aq/Ats.IE/Reports/rptSearchRescueByParty.aspx. 26. Resolution 8 (2012) Improved Coordination of Maritime, Aeronautical and Land-­Based Search and Rescue. http://www.ats.aq/devAS/ats_meetings_meeting_measure.aspx?lang=e. 27. The subsequent information on the five SAR states is found in COMNAP 2013.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 405

21/12/2016 10:10

406  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica 28. 29. 30. 31.

COMNAP 2013. Resolution 4 (2013) Improved Collaboration on Search and Rescue (SAR) in Antarctica. COMNAP 2013. See also CCAMLR Working Paper 61 (2013). Measure 4 (2004) Insurance and contingency planning for tourism and non-­governmental activities in the Antarctic Treaty Area. http://www.ats.aq/devAS/ats_meetings_meeting_measure.aspx?lang=e. See also Jabour 2007. 32. Measure 4 (2004). View Approval Details. http://www.ats.aq/devAS/ats_meetings_meeting_measure. aspx?lang=e. 33. Jabour 2007. 34. Personal communication, Dr Philip Tracey, Australian Antarctic Division, 5 February 2014. A new Part 3A Safety Approvals has been inserted into the Antarctic Treaty (Environment Protection) Act 1980 [No. 103, 1980 as amended], but remains un-­commenced until such time as the measure enters into force. 35. CCAMLR. Resolution 20/XXII (2003). Ice-­strengthening standards in high-­latitude fisheries. http://www. ccamlr.org/en/resolution-­20/xxii-­2003. 36. CCAMLR. Resolution 33/XXX (2011). Provision of flag vessel information to Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres. http://www.ccamlr.org/en/resolution-­33/xxx-­2011. 37. CCAMLR. Resolution 23/XXIII (2004). Safety on board vessels fishing in the Convention Area. http:// www.ccamlr.org/en/resolution-­23/xxiii-­2004. 38. IMO. Cape Town Agreement on the Implementation of the Provisions of the 1993 Protocol relating to the Torremolinos International Convention for the Safety of Fishing Vessels, 1977 (not in force), 11 October 2012. IMO International Conference on the Safety of Fishing Vessels Document SFV-­P/CONF.1/16,29 October 2012. Currently the Agreement has only three contracting states/parties. Entry into force will be effected ‘12 months after the date on which not less than 22 States the aggregate number of whose fishing vessels of 24 m in length and over operating on the high seas is not less than 3,600 have expressed their consent to be bound by it (Article 4(1)). http://www.imo.org/About/Conventions/StatusOfConventions/ Pages/Default.aspx. 39. CCAMLR. Report of the Standing Committee on Implementation and Compliance, 2013. Paragraph 44. The word ‘competent’ refers to the agency responsible for SAR in each of the five Southern Ocean MRCCs. 40. CCAMLR. Conservation Measure 10-­04 (2013) Automated satellite-­linked Vessel Monitoring Systems (VMS), Article 18(iv). 41. IMO Res.A.1024(26) 2009. 42. See, for example, IMO, Guidelines for Ships Operating in Arctic Ice-­ covered Waters, 2002, MSC/ Circ.1056–MEPC/Circ.399, 23 December 2002; Enhanced Contingency Planning Guidance for Passenger Ships Operating in Areas Remote from SAR Facilities, 2006, MSC.1/Circ.1184, 31 May 2006; and Guidelines on Voyage Planning for Passenger Ships Operating in Remote Areas, 2008, A25/Res.999, 2 January 2008. For background information see Scott 2010. 43. International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships 1973, as amended by the Protocol of 1978 (in force 1983) 1340 UNTS 61 (MARPOL). 44. Under Chapter 1 of SOLAS, an ‘international voyage’ involves a ship travelling from the jurisdiction of one state through international waters, to the jurisdiction of another state. In Antarctica, this definition poses some difficulties. A claimant state is unlikely to view a voyage between its metropolitan and Antarctic-­ claimed territory, as ‘international’. States which do not recognize territorial claims, and/or see Antarctic Treaty Article IV as limiting in relation to national jurisdiction, will not consider that their ships enter into any area of national jurisdiction in Antarctica, and thus again will not see such a voyage as ‘international’. However, ships on government service such as Antarctic resupply will most likely choose to be compliant with the Polar Ship Certificate and Polar Water Operational Manual irrespective of their legal obligations. 45. Jabour 2014 provides background on the progress of the Polar Code and outlines the nature of its content. 46. There are few authoritative sources of information about the Akademik Shokalskiy and the circumstances leading to it becoming beset in ice. There are however, numerous anecdotes from the mainstream and social media (said to have reached over 32 million people) that serve to obfuscate official information. Following the incident, the Russian Federation, as the flag state of the vessel, reported to the 2014 ATCM in Brasilia (Russian Federation 2014). Australia – as the state with responsibility for maritime SAR in the region of East Antarctica where the ship was beset – reported to the IMO’s Sub-­Committee on Navigation, Communications and Search and Rescue (Australia 2014). Note that the two documents use different spelling of the vessel’s name. These two official documents are the only sources used here. 47. Australia 2014. 48. Ibid. 49. Russian Federation 2014, 4. 50. Ibid. 51. Personal communication with Dr Tony Fleming, Director, Australian Antarctic Division, 28 November 2014.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 406

21/12/2016 10:10

Southern Ocean search and rescue  407 52. Maritime New Zealand 2010a. 53. South Korean Maritime Safety Tribunal 2011. 54. Ibid, 1. Reports of the number of crew missing vary between 16 and 17. This report puts the total missing at 16. 55. Maritime New Zealand 2010b. 56. South Korean Maritime Safety Tribunal 2011. The CCAMLR paper is CCAMLR-­XXX/BG/34, but this document is not available publicly. Permission from the authors can be sought through the CCAMLR Secretariat. 57. South Korean Maritime Safety Tribunal, 2–3. 58. Ibid, 23–4. 59. Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty, Final Report of the Thirty-­seventh Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, 2014, paragraph 174. 60. Ibid. paragraph 175.

REFERENCES Argentina. 2014. Preliminary report on Antarctic tourist flows and cruise ships operating in Ushuaia during the 2013/2014 austral summer season. Information Paper 84. Thirty-­seventh Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Brasilia. Australia. 2014. Summary of the Search and Rescue response to the incident involving ‘Akademik Shokalskiy’. Document NCSR 1/INF.10. IMO Sub-­Committee on Navigation, Communications and Search and Rescue, London. CCAMLR. 2013. SAR-­WG – The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Marine Resources’ Vessel Monitoring System and its Potential to Contribute to SAR Efforts in the Southern Ocean. Working Paper 61. Thirty-­sixth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Brussels. Chile. 2013. Decimoquinta Versión de la Patrulla Antártica Naval Combinada entre Chile y Argentina. Information Paper 109. Thirty-­sixth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Brussels. COMNAP. 2008. Search and Rescue in the Antarctic. Information Paper 99. Thirty-­first Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Kiev. COMNAP. 2013. SAR-­WG – Update on actions resulting from the two COMNAP SAR workshops, ‘Towards Improved Search and Rescue Coordination and Response in the Antarctic’. Working Paper 17 rev.1. Thirty-­ sixth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Brussels. IAATO. 2014. Overview of Antarctic Tourism: 2013–14 Season and Preliminary Estimates for 2014–15 Season. Information Paper 45. rev.1. Thirty-­seventh Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Brasilia. Jabour, J. 2007. Underneath the radar: Emergency search and rescue insurance for East Antarctic tourism, Tourism in Marine Environments (special edn) 4: 203–20. Jabour, J. 2014. Progress towards the mandatory code for polar shipping, Australian Journal of Maritime and Ocean Affairs: 6: 64–7. Maritime New Zealand. 2010a. Rescue underway following Korean fishing vessel sinking. 13 December 2010. http://www.maritimenz.govt.nz/public/news/media-releases-2010/20101213a.asp. Maritime New Zealand. 2010b. Search for missing crewmen suspended. 14 December 2010. http://www.marit imenz.govt.nz/news/media-­releases-­2010/20101214b.asp. Russian Federation. 2014. Ice incident with the Russian vessel ‘Akademik Shokalsky’ in the season 2013–14. Information Paper 64. Thirty-­seventh Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Brasilia. Scott, K.N. 2010. Safety of shipping in the Southern Ocean, Journal of International Maritime Law 16: 21–44. Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty. 2013. Final Report of Thirty-­sixth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Brussels. Buenos Aires: Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty. Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty. 2014. Final Report of Thirty-­seventh Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Brasilia. Buenos Aires: Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty. South Korean Maritime Safety Tribunal. 2011. Investigation Report. The sinking of the fishing vessel Insung No.  1. http://www.taic.org.nz/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=9MTYH7KzmWo%3d&tabid=36&languag e=en-­US. http://www.maritimenz.govt.nz/news/media-­releases-­2010/20101213a.asp.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 407

21/12/2016 10:10

26.  CCAMLR: an ecosystem approach to the Southern Ocean in the Anthropocene Henrik Österblom and Olof Olsson

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT Societies are dependent on services from ecosystems, but human impacts on nature can have detrimental and long-­term effects on the capacity of ecosystems to produce such services. The Southern Ocean and the species within, is a case in point – historical extraction of whales, seals and birds and the emerging patterns of commercial fishing1 highlight this interdependence between societies and ecosystems. We refer to this dependence as a ‘social–ecological system’,2 which is shaped from dynamics across geographical scales and from the past into the future. Another central concept in this chapter is the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological era,3 underlining the profound and fundamental impact that human activities have on ecosystems worldwide, including planetary geophysical processes.4 Managing natural resources, the dynamics of which are closely coupled to social dynamics, in an increasingly globally connected, turbulent and dynamic world, represents a critical challenge for institutions from local to global levels.5 The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) is an intergovernmental organization with a mandate to manage natural resources in the Southern Ocean. Although the global dynamics of climate change and international markets have been highlighted in relation to CCAMLR previously,6 we find it relevant to revisit these and related global issues here. Our fundamental question is this: What challenges is this international organization faced with when attempting to implement a regional, ecosystem-­ focused approach in the global context of the Anthropocene? To address this question, we investigate the dynamics of CCAMLR by describing how the organization has evolved, and been shaped by social, economic, political, financial, technological and ecological factors, from the local to the global scale. We describe the historical social-­ecological context and the structure and function of this institution, its management portfolio and major achievements. We describe the roles of individual actors, including governments and non-­state actors, in shaping this evolution, and we also describe how the historic and present dynamics may shape the future of CCAMLR. The Social–Ecological History CCAMLR was established during the 1970s, triggered by growing concern about a developing krill (Euphausia superba) fishery. These concerns were primarily raised during the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting (ATCM) in 1977, where a rapidly growing Soviet krill fishery highlighted an emerging new wave of Southern Ocean resource use. Discussions took place in a context where most countries had extended their own national 408

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 408

21/12/2016 10:10

CCAMLR: an ecosystem approach  409 jurisdictions out to 200 nautical miles, through the establishment of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs). One of the main reasons for this worldwide extension of coastal zones was a growing national interest among countries to develop their own fishing in coastal and offshore waters, where foreign distant water fleets (primarily from the Soviet Union and Japan) had been substantially expanding their activities and catches since the end of the Second World War.7 The spectre of unsustainable exploitation of marine living resources in the Southern Ocean was not new in the late 1970s. Large-­scale removal firstly of Antarctic fur seals (Arctocephalus gazella) and subsequently of Southern elephant seals (Mirounga leonina) through hunting, and thereafter the sequential depletion of whales – blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus), humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) and minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) – primarily by British, Norwegian, Soviet and Japanese fleets, had a substantial impact on Southern Ocean ecosystems.8 A prevalent hypothesis is that this massive reduction of predators had cascading ecosystem effects, where the assumed prey of previously abundant mammals had increased substantially. The ‘krill surplus’ hypothesis9 stipulates that since krill was the main prey of many of these depleted predators, the large-­scale removal of mammals would result in a dramatic increase in krill. Combined with expected rapidly developing fishing technology in the 1980s, this would open up novel fishing opportunities, which, if realized, would have additional negative impacts on the Southern Ocean, and would hamper the recovery of depleted whales and other mammals. Thus, krill had to be managed, and CCAMLR, sometimes called the ‘krill commission’, was the mechanism that would ensure this. Experiences from unsustainable fishing elsewhere around the world was starting to accumulate, and ecological regime shifts in, for example, the Barents Sea and the North Pacific were important warning signs of the dangers associated with overfishing. Depletion of large stocks of predatory fish, including of tuna,10 and the establishment of regulations in EEZs were increasingly leading fishermen to explore fish stocks further offshore and at ever-­greater depths.11 The demand for fish was not showing any signs of leveling off or decreasing, but was rather increasing as a consequence of rising income levels and standards of living. The global trade of fish products was increasing and the market generated strong incentives to explore new areas and products. The Southern Ocean was still a relatively untapped and uncharted wilderness, but where the prospects were perceived as promising.12 The incentives to manage krill did not only result from the depletion of whales in the Southern Ocean, but also from a growing recognition of the vulnerabilities of Southern Ocean species and ecosystems. A number of fin-­fish species had been severely depleted in the Southern Ocean after only a few fishing seasons.13 It was becoming clear that managing krill sustainably was a ‘last chance’ to conserve one of the few remaining wilderness spaces on the planet. The fact that the Soviet Union was a major distant fishing nation in the area probably only created additional incentives for some states to regulate their globally expanding fishing activities, at the height of the Cold War. CCAMLR Structure and Function The Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CAMLR) was signed in Canberra in 1980 and entered into force in 1982.14 The Commission for the

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 409

21/12/2016 10:10

410  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) was established as the governing body of this convention in 1983 and all decisions in the Commission are taken in consensus. The Convention has a strong focus on conservation, and also includes the concept of ‘rational use’ in Article II. The Convention is characterized by a focus on the ecosystem approach and the precautionary approach, primarily expressed as: a) reducing unwanted side effects on dependent predators and habitats (including reducing by-­catch of non-­ commercial species such as seabirds or reducing impacts on benthic habitats from fishing) and b) setting precautionary catch limits on target species. These precautionary catch limits are set at a level which reduce the risk that fishing activities influence prey levels of dependent predators (including mammals and seabirds),15 and are coupled with a management program for dependent predators.16 CCAMLR is consequently often described as an advanced example of adopting a holistic ecosystem management approach.17 The Commission originally consisted of fourteen member states and has expanded to currently include twenty-­five. The secretariat is situated in Hobart, Tasmania, where all regular annual meetings are hosted. Decisions of new or revised conservation measures (the main policy tool of CCAMLR) are taken in the Commission. Annual meetings where such measures are agreed on are preceded by meetings of the Scientific Committee (SC-­ CCAMLR), which provides management advice based on assessment and research carried out by a number of working groups, including: Ecosystem Monitoring and Management (WG-­EMM), krill (WG-­Krill) and Fish Stock Assessment (WG-­FSA) as well as the CCAMLR Ecosystem Monitoring Program (CEMP). Annual meetings of the Standing Committee on Implementation and Compliance (SCIC) also precede Commission meetings, where information related to compliance with conservation measures is evaluated, as do the Standing Committee on Administration and Finance (SCAF) meetings. The mandate of CCAMLR covers the economic zones or fishing zones of a number of member states (including the United Kingdom, Norway, South Africa, France and Australia). National legislation of these member states thus applies, in addition to CCAMLR Conservation Measures. The chairman’s statement in the Convention provides specific rights to France to manage national territories (Kerguelen and Crozet Islands) and associated EEZs within CCAMLR. The CCAMLR area primarily encompasses vast areas of the high seas, and is by that nature also bound by the United Nations Fish Stock Agreement (UN-­FSA), as are all other regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs). CCAMLR can be regarded as an RFMO, but it also has a different and wider mandate, to manage the marine ecosystem, rather than a particular focus on an individual fish species (which is the case for most RFMOs). Despite this holistic mandate, the CAMLR convention does not regulate whales or seals, which are regulated by separate conventions already in effect prior to the establishment of CAMLR, including the International Whaling Commission (IWC), established in 1946, and the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals (CCAS), established in 1972.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 410

21/12/2016 10:10

CCAMLR: an ecosystem approach  411

THE CCAMLR MANAGEMENT PORTFOLIO CCAMLR manages a range of fish stocks through the catch limits for each fishery. These limits are defined using decision rules that are designed to ensure the long-­term sustainability of the fishery without negative effects on dependent ecosystems. These catch limits are defined as conservation measures, which are reviewed and further developed on an annual basis, if needed. Conservation measures can also be related to compliance, general fishery matters, fishery regulations or protected areas. Fisheries are monitored using vessel monitoring systems (VMEs) and observers on board, and information on monitoring is coordinated by the CCAMLR secretariat. Krill The krill is a small, shrimp-like crustacean that grows up to around 60 mm in length, takes three years to become sexually mature and is rich in fat and protein. Krill are often described as a ‘forage fish’ and form dense schools close to the surface. Krill are widely abundant in the Southern Ocean, and have a circumpolar distribution south of the polar front, with the main concentrations in the Scotia Sea.18 Circumpolar Antarctic krill abundances have been estimated at 379 million tonnes,19 although large uncertainties are associated with these estimates. A declining trend in the Southern Ocean krill biomass has been observed since the 1970s in the areas of highest krill concentrations.20 Krill have long been perceived as the key species in the Southern Ocean ecosystem, providing essential food for marine mammals (seals and whales) and birds (penguins).21 However, several recent studies have indicated that the importance of krill in the Southern Ocean food web may have been over stated, resulting from biased prey sampling techniques that detect components of krill (relatively slowly degrading carapaces), rather than of fish in diet samples. Also, this increasing understanding of alternative food web pathways, centred around myctophid fish (see page 412), has generated a number of interesting hypotheses related to energy flows and the changing structure and function of Southern Ocean ecosystems.22 Krill were initially harvested by the Soviet Union (Russia and Ukraine) and, to a lesser extent, by Japan. Harvesting volumes increased rapidly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, to above 500,000 tonnes per year. Following the establishment of CCAMLR, catches stabilized around 400,000 tonnes during the second half of the 1980s. CCAMLR currently has a harvest control rule that limits krill catches to 2.6 million tonnes, and harvests have ranged between 100,000 and 200,000 tonnes during the most recent decade, despite notifications by some countries of substantially larger catches. The main countries currently catching krill are Norway, South Korea and Japan, followed by Poland, Russia and China.23 The main market for krill is the rapidly growing aquaculture sector, where krill protein and fat constitutes an important, and projected growing component of aquaculture feeds (fish meal and fish oil). Krill are also used in a range of health (Omega-­3) related niche products, in cosmetics.24 Krill fishing activities are currently not limited by catch opportunities, but rather technologies for catching, processing, storing and transporting krill resources. The Norwegian company Aker Biomarine is currently operating the only Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certified krill fishery, operating in the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 411

21/12/2016 10:10

412  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Myctophids Myctophids are small fish that normally grow to 3–15 cm in length and are rich in fat and proteins.25 Myctophids form schools at large depths (300–1,500 m) and perform substantial vertical diurnal migration. Myctophids have a circumpolar distribution, with the highest concentrations associated with the Polar Front Zone26 and appear to be an important alternative for several predators, especially during years of lower krill abundances.27 Myctophid biomass in the Southern Ocean has been estimated at several hundred million tonnes (several times larger than global fish catches at around 80 million tonnes)28 and the fauna is dominated by Electrona carlsbergi, which together with E. antarctica, K. anderssoni and G. nicholsi make up 80 per cent of myctophid biomass in the area.29 Myctophids are currently not profitable to catch commercially. Despite this, experimental (commercial) catches of myctophids were performed by the Soviet Union during the early 1990s. Modest catch volumes indicate that there appear to be no realistic possibilities to harvest this resource commercially with present technology and seafood prices. Myctophids are, however, a global resource, with total biomasses well above 1,000 million tonnes.30 This is unparallelled by any global marine resource – myctophids thus represent the largest untapped protein resource globally. Toothfish Patagonian toothfish (Dissostichus eleginoides) and Antarctic toothfish (D. mawsoni) are large, long-­lived predatory fish that grow up to 2 m in length.31 Their white flesh is rich in fat and the two species of toothfish represent the most valuable fisheries in the Southern Ocean, despite the small volumes harvested.32 Toothfish fisheries were primarily developed by Soviet Union fishing vessels around the French sub-­Antarctic island of Kerguelen and by Chilean fishermen around the Chilean coast of Patagonia. Commercial fishing for toothfish in the Southern Ocean started in the 1990s, and was initially characterized by very high levels of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fisheries.33 The problem with this non-­compliance has been a main challenge to CCAMLR, as it resulted in substantial depletion of toothfish stocks, as well as the loss of albatrosses and petrels that were caught as by-­catch on baited hooks set to catch toothfish.34 There are clear signs of Patagonian toothfish stock reductions analogous to previously exploited fin-­fish species in the Antarctic, but management of these stocks has improved substantially35 and IUU fishing has decreased (see page 413). The main countries currently engaged in licensed harvesting of toothfish are the United Kingdom, France, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Spain. Main catch areas are situated around the sub-­Antarctic islands of South Georgia (UK), Kerguelen (France) and Heard and MacDonald Islands (Australia). A substantial fishery is also developing in the Indian Ocean sector of the high seas, in the Ross Sea. A number of fisheries in the Southern Ocean have been certified by the MSC, including toothfish in areas such as South Georgia and Heard and MacDonald Islands.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 412

21/12/2016 10:10

CCAMLR: an ecosystem approach  413 Fishing and Direct Effects on Seabirds An important part of CCAMLR’s work to develop the ecosystem approach has been to reduce the unwanted side effects of fishing on dependent predators. By-­catch of seabirds (albatross and petrels) emerged as a major concern through the development of long-­line fishing (for toothfish) in the 1990s, resulting in the death of several thousand seabirds. Mitigation measures taken in the licensed fishery, and a reduction of illegal fishing (see page 414) has substantially reduced by-­catch within the convention area.36 However, an additional challenge has been the interactions across geographical scales and the limited mandate of CCAMLR, as many of these far-­ranging seabirds are also caught on long-­ lines in other RFMOs. CCAMLR has increasingly collaborated with adjacent RFMOs in order to address this problem.

FITS AND STARTS IN THE EVOLUTION OF CCAMLR CCAMLR has evolved substantially from an organization that originally focused most of its practical activities on krill, to an organization with a wide mandate managing a range of species, habitats and ecosystems. This diverse ecosystem management portfolio has contributed to the perception of CCAMLR as a role model in international fisheries management.37 The development of this holistic approach has, however, also been problematic, and has been challenged by the activities of its member states. The Commission has been forced to address a number of complex and politically contentious issues, primarily IUU fishing in the past and the establishment of marine protected areas (MPAs) in the present – addressing both of these issues has represented key challenges in order to develop further the ecosystem approach and the international leadership of CCAMLR. Below, we investigate and summarize the dynamics associated with these challenges. Historical Crises Increase Adaptive Capacity Non-­compliance, or IUU fishing, in relation to toothfish fishing has historically been a critical concern for CCAMLR and the wider geopolitics of the Southern Ocean.38 Such fishing activities have caused repeated crises in the relationships between CCAMLR member states and serious concerns in relation to the perceived legitimacy and effectiveness of the organization.39 During the early stages of development of IUU fishing, CCAMLR engaged in the first intersessional meeting to address this serious concern, as it had become evident that several of the CCAMLR member states were associated with IUU fishing. This meeting resulted in the development of a (at the time) globally unique catch documentation scheme, designed to improve traceability of toothfish products.40 IUU operators in the Southern Ocean were however able to adapt to such formal conservation measures.41 Since all decisions in CCAMLR are taken in consensus, it is enough that one member state opposes a recommendation for a conservation measure for it not to be passed. Formal management measures42 have been complemented with a range of informal management measures, where environmental non-­governmental organizations and the licensed fishing, have developed ‘naming and shaming’ strategies (including

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 413

21/12/2016 10:10

414  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica informal ‘red lists’ of suspected IUU vessels), unconventional investigations and a range of alternatives to formal conservation measures.43 Information campaigns and political lobbying by these non-­state actors, combined with the development of new and revised conservation measures within CCAMLR, sentence convictions for apprehended IUU operators and increased international collaboration beyond CCAMLR to reduce IUU fishing globally,44 has substantially reduced non-­ compliance within the CCAMLR area.45 Importantly, the successful reduction of the IUU crisis was accomplished by effective collaboration between governments, environmental NGOs and the licensed fishing industry, where non-­state actors effectively complemented the activities and resources of governments.46 Collaboration across geographical scales and beyond the member states of the Commission was necessary for successful outcomes, and the involvement of some countries in IUU fishing also resulted in them becoming members of the Commission. Due to a combination of a well-­established protocol for traceability (an electronic catch documentation scheme), formal sanctioning mechanisms (blacklisting of IUU vessels) and a vessel monitoring system, all managed by the CCAMLR secretariat, combined with substantial investments in offshore monitoring, there are now few incentives to engage in IUU fishing in the Southern Ocean.47 The activities and experiences of CCAMLR in continuously co-­evolving with IUU operators and developing formal and informal compliance measures, have served as inspiration for a number of regional fisheries management organizations around the world48 and have further strengthened the perception of CCAMLR as a role model in international marine governance. These experiences have contributed to increasing the adaptive capacity of CCAMLR and the global awareness and regulations associated with IUU fishing.49 However, reducing IUU fishing was comparatively easy. By reducing IUU fishing, governments were able to illustrate their common commitments to the CCAMLR convention, while at the same time (in the case of nations with sub-­Antarctic islands) enforcing their authority over national sovereign territories. Environmental NGOs were able to attract substantial attention to the challenges of managing the Southern Ocean and to address effectively critical conservation concerns of globally vulnerable and charismatic species such as the albatross. The licensed fishing industry could only gain from reduced IUU fishing. Clear economic incentives were created by improving future fishing opportunities. Countries associated with IUU fishing (operating as flag states of IUU vessels or having their nationals engaged in such fishing) could only benefit from a reduced level of IUU fishing, as this would reduce the public embarrassment of the association. The MPAs Conflict Exposes Limitations of Existing Incentives to Engage in Collective Action Long-­term, face-­to-­face interactions are critical components of building trust and a capacity to deal with new challenges. Theoretically, the last fifteen plus years of collaboration in CCAMLR aimed at reducing IUU fishing and associated challenges would presumably increase the capacity of CCAMLR to adapt to new crises. The last few years of Commission meetings have, however, revealed the limited capacity of CCAMLR to

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 414

21/12/2016 10:10

CCAMLR: an ecosystem approach  415 develop its international leadership further, and the changing composition and incentives operating within the Commission itself. In 2002, CCAMLR affirmed its commitment to the World Summit on Sustainable Development goals of establishing a representative network of marine protected areas.50 In 2009, CCAMLR appeared to develop its global leadership in marine governance through the establishment of the first ever marine protected area (MPA) in the high seas, near the South Orkney Islands.51 However, conservation measures that further protect marine ecosystems and contribute to the establishment of a representative network of MPAs have been fraught with contesting views and an inability of CCAMLR member states to agree in consensus.52 Proposals by the USA and New Zealand to establish the world’s largest MPAs in the high seas have been the major issues of concern during the CCAMLR meetings of 2013 and 2014, without generating noticeable results. A second intersessional meeting (following the meeting in 2000 that contributed to establishing the first version of the Catch Documentation Scheme) was held in 2013 to develop further proposals for MPAs, but it failed to generate any results.53 Official CCAMLR documents, scientific accounts of the process and NGO observer comments describe part of this inability of CCAMLR to establish high seas MPAs as a consequence of favouring individual and increasing national interests in securing access to resources over shared goals of conserving Southern Ocean ecosystems.54 Part of the explanation may lie in the changing balance in the number of fishing nations in relation to non-­fishing nations in CCAMLR and the fact that the seven claimant states are a small minority in an organization with twenty-­five members (in other words, an increasing proportion of CCAMLR member states are actively engaged in fishing).55 Historical efforts to reduce IUU fishing contributed to establishing a culture of trust between environmental NGOs and the fishing industry. However, recent developments in relation to MPAs may have eroded part of this important trust. The MPA issue has been highly contentious and has introduced a new dynamic within CCAMLR. Conversely to the IUU issue, member states now have to agree on an acceptable compromise where there will be clear losers (measured in fishing opportunities) in the short term. Coalitions between strong proponents of MPAs and countries that oppose the establishment of MPAs risk resulting in a decreased credibility of CCAMLR. Interviews carried out in 2009 and 2010 with individuals with long-­term experience in CCAMLR56 indicated that it was perceived as becoming increasingly like any RFMO, in which every country is arguing for its own share of fishing opportunities, rather than collaboratively stimulating collective action. As in any collective action problem, the current challenge lies in identifying mechanisms that stimulate a situation in which incentives among diverse actors can be aligned. Several of the countries actively and directly engaged in toothfish fishing in the areas that have been proposed as MPAs have raised concerns to existing proposals.57 Norway is, by volume and value, the largest fishing nation in the Southern Ocean. Its substantial and developing role as a krill fishing nation in the region provides a strong incentive to oppose the establishment of MPAs that may limit further expansion of fishing activities. Concerns raised by Korea and Japan are also understandable with this logic, as they are the second and third largest fishing countries measured in landed volumes in recent years. Russia, together with Ukraine and China played an important part in raising concerns in relation to the MPA proposals raised in 2013, despite the fact that neither of these

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 415

21/12/2016 10:10

416  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica countries are major fishing nations. However, the historical fishing activities of both Russia and Ukraine in the Southern Ocean, and the global Chinese expansion of fishing activities elsewhere58 may represent indications of the ambitions of these states to further expand their activities in the Southern Ocean and to demand further ‘rational use’ of marine resources. The proportion of member states in CCAMLR that are actively engaged in fishing has changed during recent years, with a shift towards an increasing proportion of members with direct fishing interests.59 Official catch statistics illustrate that a limited number of countries and fishing companies attain the economic benefits from CCAMLR fishing activities. What are less clear from such statistics are the costs associated with infrastructure and human capacity to ensure monitoring and enforcement, in which a relatively small number of countries have invested. Australia, for instance, has invested millions of Australian dollars in the construction and deployment of a monitoring vessel that spends in excess of 200 days a year at sea to monitor the Australian Heard and MacDonald fishing protection zone and associated areas.60 France, with its naval capacity based at Reunion, is also an active country in terms of monitoring on the water and it has invested substantial technological and human capacity, in collaboration with Australia, in a satellite surveillance program aimed specifically at monitoring IUU fishing around Kerguelen and Heard and MacDonald Islands. New Zealand has recently deployed purpose-­built vessels for monitoring the Southern Ocean and is, together with Australia, carrying out regular overflights to monitor fishing activities. Finally, the United Kingdom is an additional member state that invests substantially in monitoring and enforcement around South Georgia, using its surveillance and maritime capacity based in the Falklands Islands. These monitoring and enforcement capacities are not only deployed to secure sustainable use of fish resources, but are also a way to display ability, commitment and power for national and international audiences.61 The sovereignty, security and stewardship logic behind actions of CCAMLR member states may differ, and the explanation for their activities and political direction may in many cases extend far beyond CCAMLR. For example, a globally increased demand for fishmeal due to dramatically increased production levels in aquaculture62 has contributed to a rapid increase in fishmeal and fish oil prices.63 Global market demand for small pelagic fish, such as krill, is thus rapidly increasing and further stimulating incentives to develop krill fisheries. Diminishing stocks or increased regulations of small pelagic species elsewhere64 naturally direct interest towards the abundant resources of krill in the Southern Ocean. Despite the multitude of political reasons for the actions of CCAMLR member states, it is clear that both benefits and burdens are unevenly distributed. However, this issue is increasingly addressed elsewhere in international governance, including in tuna RFMOs,65 and may represent an emerging topic also in CCAMLR. Emerging Issues on the Horizon The ‘krill commission’ of CCAMLR has never really been put to the test in its ability to deal with its original purpose. Krill fishing has yet to become the next ‘gold-­rush’ activity in marine resource use and it has been argued that it never will. Technological and logistic constraints, or more importantly limited economic feasibility, will probably never provide

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 416

21/12/2016 10:10

CCAMLR: an ecosystem approach  417 sufficient incentives to engage in krill fishing. Why then, did the Soviet Union engage in landing catches to the order of several hundred thousand tonnes? Dramatic stock depletions in Soviet (Russian) coastal waters, the subsequent depletion of adjacent Barents Sea stocks, and exclusion from many productive fishing grounds in North and South America, eventually pushed the Soviet fleet further southward.66 Economic constraints were not an inhibition, and geopolitical interests probably played an important part. The Soviet Union was, together with Japan, the largest krill catch nation globally during the 1980s, with catches in excess of one million tonnes.67 Currently, the largest krill catch nation in the world is China. Although Chinese domestic catches have been found to be exaggerated,68 high seas and distant water catches have, conversely been substantially under reported.69 Hence, a new global fishing actor has emerged, also with limited needs to take economic and ecological rationality into account and with expanding and noticeable geopolitical ambitions around both poles and in Africa. A rapidly growing demand for Chinese fishmeal, due to the dramatic rise in Chinese aquaculture,70 only adds to the equation. We would be surprised if increasing Chinese ambitions to harvest krill in the Southern Ocean does not put CCAMLR to the test in the years leading up to 2020. We would not be surprised if Chinese, Korean, Japanese or even Norwegian vessels start exploratory fishing for myctophids during the same time period.

CONCLUSION Developing and maintaining a strong commitment to the ecosystem approach in a politically contentious environment is challenging, as priorities among and alliances between members, states and actors change over time. CCAMLR is and has been influenced by geopolitical dynamics, changing global markets and ecosystem change, which operate across temporal and spatial scales. The example of CCAMLR demonstrates the diversity of social–ecological factors that shape outcomes and the practical implementation of the ecosystem approach. To clarify existing uncertainty and differences in the interpretation of ‘rational use’ appears to be an increasingly important issue for CCAMLR,71 as this could clarify and define how to manage trade-­offs and conflicting views between conservation and use. Exploring mechanisms for sharing both benefits and burdens appears to be a second relevant issue to address in this context. International marine governance institutions are in great need of role models, and CCAMLR has the track record and ability to continue developing a leadership position by acting as a source of inspiration for others.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Mistra and the Baltic Ecosystem Adaptive Management (BEAM) program provided funding through a core grant to the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 417

21/12/2016 10:10

418  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

NOTES   1. Chapter 27 in this volume.   2. Berkes et al. 2000.   3. Steffen et al. 2007.   4. Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015.   5. Walker et al. 2009; Helbing 2013.   6. Croxall and Nicol 2004; Miller 2014.   7. Kock 2007; Österblom and Folke 2015; Smith 2015.   8. Croxall and Nicol 2004; Kock et al. 2007.   9. See, for example, Surma et al. 2014. 10. Christensen et al. 2003; 2014. 11. Pauly et al 2005; Morato et al. 2006. 12. Miller 2004. 13. Ainley and Blight 2009; Ainley and Pauly 2014. 14. Kock 2007. 15. Constable et al. 2000; Kock et al. 2007; Constable 2011. 16. Agnew 1997; Constable et al. 2000. 17. Murawski 2007; Ruckelshaus et al. 2008. 18. Nicol and Endo 1999. 19. Atkinson et al. 2009. 20. Atkinson et al. 2004. 21. Nicol and Endo 1999; Hill et al. 2006; Murphy et al. 2007. 22. Lea et al. 2002; Cherel et al. 2007; Murphy et al. 2007. 23. CCAMLR 2012. 24. Nicol et al. 2012. 25. Pakhomov et al. 1996, Collins et al. 2008. 26. Kozlov 1995. 27. Murphy et al. 2007; Trathan et al. 2007. 28. Kozlov 1995; Collins et al. 2008. 29. Ibid. 30. Irigoien et al. 2014. 31. Collins et al. 2010. 32. Brooks 2013. 33. Agnew 2000; Miller 2004. 34. Miller 2004. 35. Bialek 2003; Miller et al. 2010. 36. Waugh et al. 2008. 37. Cullis-­Suzuki and Pauly 2010. 38. Dodds 2000. 39. Österblom et al. 2011. 40. Agnew 2000. 41. Österblom et al. 2010. 42. Bialek 2003. 43. Fallon and Kriwoken 2004; Österblom et al. 2011. 44. Österblom 2014. 45. Österblom and Bodin 2012; Bodin and Österblom 2013. 46. Bodin and Österblom 2013. 47. Miller 2010; Miller et al. 2010; Österblom and Bodin 2012; Bodin and Österblom 2013. 48. Schultz et al. 2015. 49. Flothmann et al. 2010; Österblom 2014. 50. Brooks 2013. 51. CCAMLR 2009. 52. Brooks 2013. 53. Ibid. 54. Brooks 2013; ECO 2014. 55. Ibid. 56. Österblom et al 2011. 57. Brooks 2013. 58. Pauly et al. 2014.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 418

21/12/2016 10:10

CCAMLR: an ecosystem approach  419 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

Brooks 2013. Österblom and Sumaila 2011. Dodds 2012. Troell et al. 2014. Kerstens 2013. Cury et al. 2011; Smith et al. 2011. Hanich 2011. Lysenko 1983. Österblom and Folke 2015. Watson and Pauly 2001. Pauly et al. 2014. Cao et al. 2015. Jacquet et al. 2016.

REFERENCES Agnew, D.J. 1997. The CCAMLR Ecosystem Monitoring Programme. Antarctic Science 9: 235–42. Agnew, D.J. 2000. The illegal and unregulated fishery for toothfish in the southern Ocean, and the CCAMLR catch documentation scheme. Marine Policy 24: 361–74. Ainley, D.G., and L.K. Blight. 2009. Ecological repercussions of historical fish extraction from the Southern Ocean. Fish and Fisheries 10: 13–38. Ainley, D.G., and D. Pauly. 2014. Fishing down the food web of the Antarctic continental shelf and slope. Polar Record 50: 92–107. Atkinson, A., V. Siegel, E. Pakhomov, and P. Rothery. 2004. Long-­term decline in krill stock and increase in salps within the Southern Ocean. Nature 432: 100–3. Atkinson, A., V. Siegel, E.A. Pakhomov, M.J. Jessopp, and V. Loeb. 2009. A re-­appraisal of the total biomass and annual production of Antarctic krill. Deep-­Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers 56: 727–40. Berkes, F., C. Folke, and J. Colding. 2000. Linking Social and Ecological Systems: Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bialek, D. 2003. Sink or swim: Measures under international law for the conservation of the Patagonian toothfish in the Southern Ocean. Ocean Development and International Law 34: 105–37. Bodin, T., and H. Österblom. 2013. International fisheries regime effectiveness – activities and resources of key actors in the Southern Ocean. Global Environmental Change 23: 948–56. Brooks, C.M. 2013. Competing values on the Antarctic high seas: CCAMLR and the challenge of marine-­ protected areas. The Polar Journal 3: 277–300. Cao, L., R.L. Naylor, P. Henriksson, D. Leadbitter, M. Metian, M. Troell, and W. Zhang. 2015. China’s aquaculture and the world’s wild fisheries. Science 347: 133–5. CCAMLR. 2012. CCAMLR Statistical Bulletin – Volume 24 (2002–2011). CCAMLR, Hobart. Cherel, Y., K.A. Hobson, C. Guinet, and C. Vanpe. 2007. Stable isotopes document seasonal changes in trophic niches and winter foraging individual specialization in diving predators from the Southern Ocean. Journal of Animal Ecology 76: 826–36. Christensen, V., M. Coll, C. Piroddi, J. Steenbeek, J. Buszowski, and D. Pauly. 2014. A century of fish biomass decline in the ocean. Marine Ecology Progress Series 512: 155–66. Christensen, V., S. Guénette, J.J. Heymans, C.J. Walters, R. Watson, D. Zeller, and D. Pauly. 2003. Hundred-­year decline of North Atlantic predatory fishes. Fish and Fisheries 4: 1–24. Collins, M.A., P. Brickle, J. Brown, and M. Belchier. 2010. The Patagonian toothfish. Biology, ecology and fishery. Advances in Marine Biology 58: 227–300. Collins, M.A., J.C. Xavier, N.M. Johnston, A.W. North, P. Enderlein, G.A. Tarling, C.M. Waluda, E.J. Hawker, and N.J. Cunningham. 2008. Patterns in the distribution of myctophid fish in the northern Scotia Sea ­ecosystem. Polar Biology 31: 837–51. Constable, A.J. 2011. Lessons from CCAMLR on the implementation of the ecosystem approach to managing fisheries. Fish and Fisheries 12: 138–51. Constable, A.J., W.K. de la Mare, D.J. Agnew, I. Everson, and D. Miller. 2000. Managing fisheries to conserve the Antarctic marine ecosystem: Practical implementation of the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). ICES Journal of Marine Science 57: 778–91. Croxall, J.P., and S. Nicol. 2004. Management of Southern Ocean fisheries: Global forces and future sustainability. Antarctic Science 16: 569–84.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 419

21/12/2016 10:10

420  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica Cullis-­Suzuki, S., and D. Pauly. 2010. Failing the high seas: A global evaluation of regional fisheries management organizations. Marine Policy 34: 1036–42. Cury, P.M., I.L. Boyd, S. Bonhommeau, T. Anker-­ Nilssen, R.J.M. Crawford, R.W. Furness, J.A. Mills, E.J. Murphy, H. Österblom, M. Paleczny, J.F. Piatt, J.P. Roux, L. Shannon, and W.J. Sydeman. 2011. Global seabird response to forage fish depletion – One-­third for the birds. Science 334: 1703–6. Dodds, K. 2000. Geopolitics, Patagonian toothfish and living resource regulation in the Southern Ocean. Third World Quarterly 21: 229–46. Dodds, K. 2012. The Falkland Islands as a strategic gateway: Britain and the South Atlantic Overseas Territories. RUSI Journal 157: 18–25. ECO. 2014. A publication of Non-­Governmental Environmental Organizations at the XXXIII Commission on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources Meeting. Hobart. Fallon, L.D., and L.K. Kriwoken. 2004. International influence of an Australian nongovernment organization in the protection of Patagonian toothfish. Ocean Development and International Law 35: 221–6. Flothmann, S., K. von Kistowski, E. Dolan, E. Lee, F. Meere, and G. Album. 2010. Closing Loopholes: Getting Illegal Fishing Under Control. Science 328:1235–6. Hanich, Q.A. 2011. Distributing the bigeye conservation burden in the western and central pacific fisheries. Marine Policy 36: 327–32. Helbing, D. 2013. Globally networked risks and how to respond. Nature 497: 51–9. Hill, S.L., E.J. Murphy, K. Reid, P.N. Trathan, and A.J. Constable. 2006. Modelling Southern Ocean ecosystems: Krill, the food-­web, and the impacts of harvesting. Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 81: 581–608. Irigoien, X., T.A. Klevjer, A. Røstad, U. Martinez, G. Boyra, J.L. Acuña, A. Bode, F. Echevarria, J.I. Gonzalez-­ Gordillo, S. Hernandez-­Leon, S. Agusti, D.L. Aksnes, C.M. Duarte, and S. Kaartvedt. 2014. Large mesopelagic fishes biomass and trophic efficiency in the open ocean. Nature Communications 5. Jacquet, J., E. Blood-­Patterson, C. Brooks and D. Ainley. 2016. ‘Rational use’ in Antarctic waters. Marine Policy 63: 28–34. Kerstens, D. 2013. Investing in Seafood 2013. London: IntraFish Media. Kock, K.H. 2007. Antarctic Marine Living Resources – exploitation and its management in the Southern Ocean. Antarctic Science 19: 231–8. Kock, K.H., K. Reid, J. Croxall, and S. Nicol. 2007. Fisheries in the Southern Ocean: An ecosystem approach. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362: 2333–49. Kozlov, A.N. 1995. A review of the trophic role of mesopelagic fish of the family Myctophidae in the Southern Ocean ecosystem. CCAMLR Science 2: 71–7. Lea, M.A., Y. Cherel, C. Guinet, and P.D. Nichols. 2002. Antarctic fur seals foraging in the Polar Frontal Zone: Inter-­annual shifts in diet as shown from fecal and fatty acid analyses. Marine Ecology Progress Series 245: 281–97. Lysenko, V. 1983. A Crime Against the World – Memoirs of a Russian Sea Captain. Victor Gollancz. Miller, D.G.M. 2004. Patagonian toothfish – the storm gathers. Pages 105–45 in Fish Piracy: Combating Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing. Paris: OECD. Miller, D.G.M. 2010. Occupying the high ground: Technology and the war on IUU fishing. Pages 77–99 in Law, Technology and Science for Oceans in Globalisation: IUU Fishing, Oil Pollution, Bioprospecting, Outer Continental Shelf. Leiden: Brill-­Nijhoff. Miller, D.G.M. 2014. Antarctic marine living resources: ‘The future is not what it used to be’. Chapter 3 in T. Tin, D. Liggett, P.T. Maher and M. Lamers (eds), Antarctic Futures – Human Engagement with the Antarctic Environment. Heidelberg, New York, London: Springer Dordrecht. Miller, D.G.M., N. Slicer, and E.N. Sabourenkov. 2010. IUU fishing in Antarctic waters: CCAMLR actions and regulations. Pages 175–96 in Law, Technology and Science for Oceans in Globalisation: IUU Fishing, Oil Pollution, Bioprospecting, Outer Continental Shelf. Leiden: Brill-­Nijhoff. Morato, T., R. Watson, T.J. Pitcher, and D. Pauly. 2006. Fishing down the deep. Fish and Fisheries 7: 24–34. Murawski, S.A. 2007. Ten myths concerning ecosystem approaches to marine resource management. Marine Policy 31: 681–90. Murphy, E.J., J.L. Watkins, P.N. Trathan, K. Reid, M.P. Meredith, S.E. Thorpe, N.M. Johnston, A. Clarke, G.A. Tarling, M.A. Collins, J. Forcada, R.S. Shreeve, A. Atkinson, R. Korb, M.J. Whitehouse, P. Ward, P.G. Rodhouse, P. Enderlein, A.G. Hirst, A.R. Martin, S.L. Hill, I.J. Staniland, D.W. Pond, D.R. Briggs, N.J. Cunningham, and A.H. Fleming. 2007. Spatial and temporal operation of the Scotia Sea ecosystem: A review of large-­scale links in a krill-­centred food web. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362: 113–48. Nicol, S., and Y. Endo. 1999. Krill fisheries: Development, management and ecosystem implications. Aquatic Living Resources 12: 105–20. Nicol, S., J. Foster, and S. Kawaguchi. 2012. The fishery for Antarctic krill – recent developments. Fish and Fisheries 13: 30–40.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 420

21/12/2016 10:10

CCAMLR: an ecosystem approach  421 Österblom, H. 2014. Catching up on fisheries crime. Conservation Biology 28: 877–9. Österblom, H., and O. Bodin. 2012. Global cooperation among diverse organizations to reduce illegal fishing in the Southern Ocean. Conservation Biology 26: 638–48. Österblom, H., A. Constable, and S. Fukumi. 2011. Illegal fishing and the organized crime analogy. Trends in ecology and evolution (personal edn) 26: 261–2. Österblom, H., and C. Folke. 2015. Globalization, marine regime shifts and the Soviet Union. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 370:1–8. Österblom, H., and U.R. Sumaila. 2011. Toothfish crises, actor diversity and the emergence of compliance mechanisms in the Southern Ocean. Global Environmental Change 21: 972–82. Österblom, H., U.R. Sumaila, O. Bodin, J.H. Sundberg, and A.J. Press. 2010. Adapting to regional enforcement: Fishing down the governance index. PLoS ONE 5:1–8. Pakhomov, E.A., R. Perissinotto, and C.D. McQuaid. 1996. Prey composition and daily rations of myctophid fishes in the Southern Ocean. Marine Ecology Progress Series 134: 1–14. Pauly, D., D. Belhabib, R. Blomeyer, W.W.W.L. Cheung, A.M. Cisneros-­Montemayor, D. Copeland, S. Harper, V.W.Y. Lam, Y. Mai, F. Le Manach, H. Österblom, K.M. Mok, L. van der Meer, A. Sanz, S. Shon, U.R. Sumaila, W. Swartz, R. Watson, Y. Zhai, and D. Zeller. 2014. China’s distant-­water fisheries in the 21st century. Fish and Fisheries 15: 474–88. Pauly, D., R. Watson, and J. Alder. 2005. Global trends in world fisheries: Impacts on marine ecosystems and food security. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 360: 5–12. Rockström, J., W. Steffen, K. Noone, Å. Persson, F.S. Chapin, E.F. Lambin, T.M. Lenton, M. Scheffer, C. Folke, H.J. Schellnhuber, B. Nykvist, C.A. De Wit, T. Hughes, S. van der Leeuw, H. Rodhe, S. Sörlin, P.K. Snyder, R. Costanza, U. Svedin, M. Falkenmark, L. Karlberg, R.W. Corell, V.J. Fabry, J. Hansen, B. Walker, D. Liverman, K. Richardson, P. Crutzen, and J.A. Foley. 2009. A safe operating space for humanity. Nature 461: 472–5. Ruckelshaus, M., T. Klinger, N. Knowlton, and D.P. DeMaster. 2008. Marine ecosystem-­based management in practice: Scientific and governance challenges. BioScience 58: 53–63. Schultz, L., C. Folke, H. Österblom, and P. Olsson. 2015. Adaptive governance, ecosystem management, and natural capital. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112: 7369–7374. Smith, A.D.M., C.J. Brown, C.M. Bulman, E.A. Fulton, P. Johnson, I.C. Kaplan, H. Lozano-­ Montes, S. Mackinson, M. Marzloff, L.J. Shannon, Y.-­J. Shin, and J. Tam. 2011. Impacts of fishing low–trophic level species on marine ecosystems. Science 333: 1147–50. Smith, R.D. 2015. Japan’s international fisheries policy: law, diplomacy and policy governing resource security. Abingdon: Routledge. Steffen, W., P.J. Crutzen, and J.R. McNeill. 2007. The anthropocene: are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature? Ambio 36: 614–21. Steffen, W., K. Richardson, J. Rockström, S.E. Cornell, I. Fetzer, E.M. Bennett, R. Biggs, S.R. Carpenter, W. de Vries, C.A. de Wit, C. Folke, D. Gerten, J. Heinke, G.M. Mace, L.M. Persson, V. Ramanathan, B. Reyers, and S. Sörlin. 2015. Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science 347. Surma, S., E.A. Pakhomov, and T.J. Pitcher. 2014. Effects of whaling on the structure of the Southern Ocean food web: insights on the ‘krill surplus’ from ecosystem modelling. PLoS ONE 9: e114978. Trathan, P.N., F.J., and M.E.J. 2007. Environmental forcing and Southern Ocean marine predator populations: effects of climate change and variability. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362: 2351–65. Troell, M., R.L. Naylor, M. Metian, M. Beveridge, P.H. Tyedmers, C. Folke, K.J. Arrow, S. Barrett, A.S. Crépin, P.R. Ehrlich, A. Gren, N. Kautsky, S.A. Levin, K. Nyborg, H. Österblom, S. Polasky, M. Scheffer, B.H. Walker, T. Xepapadeas, and A. de Zeeuw. 2014. Does aquaculture add resilience to the global food system? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111: 13257–63. Walker, B., S. Barrett, S. Polasky, V. Galaz, C. Folke, G. Engström, F. Ackerman, K. Arrow, S. Carpenter, K. Chopra, G. Daily, P. Ehrlich, T. Hughes, N. Kautsky, S. Levin, K.-­G. Mäler, J. Shogren, J. Vincent, T. Xepapadeas, and A. de Zeeuw. 2009. Looming global-­scale Failures and missing institutions. Science 325: 1345–6. Watson, R., and D. Pauly. 2001. Systematic distortions in world fisheries catch trends. Nature 414: 534–6. Waugh, S.M., G.B. Baker, R. Gales, and J.P. Croxall. 2008. CCAMLR process of risk assessment to minimise the effects of longline fishing mortality on seabirds. Marine Policy 32: 442–54.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 421

21/12/2016 10:10

27.  Fishing the bottom of the Earth: the political challenges of ecosystem-­based management Cassandra M. Brooks and David G. Ainley

INTRODUCTION World fishery take peaked during the 1980s and has since declined as stocks have become fully or over exploited,1 forcing fishermen into ever deeper and more remote waters.2 Antarctic fishing has reflected this global trend. In 1996 a single, exploratory long-­line vessel from New Zealand penetrated the icy waters of the Ross Sea, and in doing so, initiated the most remote fishery on Earth.3 Historically, the depletion of marine resources in other parts of the world had driven fishing vessels into the Southern Ocean, initially for seals, then whales, then fish and krill, in some areas a veritable ‘fishing down the food web’.4 Yet, some of the southernmost reaches of the Southern Ocean, including the Ross Sea, had remained protected by remoteness and daunting sea-­ice conditions. These corners of the Southern Ocean contain some of the last healthy continental shelf ecosystems left on Earth,5 including the last remaining unexploited fish stocks.6 These competing realities have clashed in the Ross Sea, creating tension between ‘rational use’ and ecosystem conservation. While efforts to designate a Ross Sea marine protected area (MPA) have been underway for almost a decade, upwards of twenty vessels have continued to fish for toothfish which is marketed as ‘Chilean Sea Bass’, also known as ‘White Gold’ owing to the price it commands.7 The Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR),8 the arm of the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) that governs biological resource extraction from the Southern Ocean, contains founding articles upon which these economically valuable resources can be regulated while protecting the integrity of the Antarctic marine ecosystem, all under conditions of rapid environmental change. This chapter reflects on the difficulties this has presented in practice, and the severe challenges posed for the maintenance of both ecosystem-­based management, and (the crux of the issue) the maintenance of the Antarctic marine ecosystem itself. Given the centrality of resource management and environmental protection in the wider regime of the ATS – and the core purpose and functions of CCAMLR – this situation is one of political, ecological and economic significance. Indeed, one might argue that what we are seeing in relation to our management of the Southern Ocean is a test of the bona fides of the ATS. On the one hand, the Commission that oversees the Convention has been able to regulate the take of Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) effectively and even implement ecosystem-­based management (EBM). Success emanated from an early start initiated by SCAR (the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) through its BIOMASS program, which focused on Antarctic krill and its place in the ecosystem. The Commission’s success with krill may have been further facilitated by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Until then, the Soviets had depleted many Antarctic fish stocks and were taking increasing 422

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 422

21/12/2016 10:10

Fishing the bottom of the Earth  423 amounts of krill in a heavily subsidized effort. However with the breakup of the USSR, krill fishing dramatically decreased, giving the Commission time to investigate further the ways of EBM, then a largely untried concept in fisheries management. Further, krill was not a high-­value or quality fish product. Fish farming and fish oil pills (both of which use krill) were not in demand as they are today, and thus catch rates remained low relative to stock biomass and relative to CCAMLR catch limits.9 On the other hand, CCAMLR was not prepared for the rapid development of the highly lucrative Antarctic toothfish fishery. While the CCAMLR Commission regulates the high seas10 krill catch in line with founding principles of EBM, regulation of most Patagonian toothfish (Dissostichus eleginoides) fisheries is facilitated by their location within Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) around sub-­Antarctic islands (all outside of Antarctic Treaty jurisdiction).11 In contrast, the Commission’s regulation of the high seas Antarctic toothfish (D. mawsoni) fishery, in an Olympic or ‘race-­to-­fish’ style, is being exercised counter to EBM under the principles of a single-­species maximum sustainable yield (MSY)12 strategy.13 While krill fishery management, in keeping with CCAMLR principles, includes extensive research on krill natural history and the effects of krill availability on the ecosystem, as well as independent assessment and monitoring of the stock and dependent species, the Antarctic toothfish fishery does not. Instead the single-­ species MSY strategy operates without basic information on Antarctic toothfish natural history. The Commission’s current efforts towards establishing MPAs could be a first step towards EBM for toothfish, including the encouragement for research using special research zones. But given the intense competition in the Ross Sea, which is the only large high seas Antarctic toothfish fishery in the CCAMLR area, invocation of EBM and the adoption of MPAs have stalled.

CONQUERING THE SEALS AND WHALES Despite its remoteness and harsh conditions, humans have exploited the Southern Ocean beginning soon after James Cook reported an abundance of fur seals on South Georgia in 1775.14 As detailed by Hofman,15 British and American sealers exploited sub-­Antarctic and Antarctic fur seals (Arctocephalus gazelle and A. tropicalis) for their furs, bringing them to the brink of extinction by the 1820s. Their demise was followed by southern elephant seals (Mirounga leonina) and king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonica), taken for their oil.16 These fur seal, elephant seal and penguin populations have since recovered.17 Perhaps due to their inaccessibility, true seals, all denizens of the Antarctic sea ice zone (crabeater, Lobodon carcinophaga; Weddell, Leptonychotes weddellii; Ross Ommataphoca rossii; and leopard, Hydrurga leptonyx), had not been the subject of exploitation, with the exception of brief episodes by the Germans (1873), the Scots and Norwegians (1892–5), the British (early 1900s), and New Zealand (1960–80s). Then, in the aftermath of reduced harp and hooded seal populations in the North Atlantic in the 1960s, Norway led an experimental seal hunt in the Antarctic pack ice.18 Given the history of severe past overharvesting of pinnipeds, the Antarctic Treaty States responded by developing and signing the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Seals (CCAS) in 1972.19 CCAS was the first attempt among Antarctic Treaty States to address exploitation and was considered precautionary and pace setting in that it was drafted prior to large-­scale seal harvest. In

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 423

21/12/2016 10:10

424  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica another pace-­setting move, to protect scientific research needed to understand seal natural history, it also set aside three reserves where no sealing would be allowed: McMurdo Sound, Edisto Inlet and Signy Island. Although CCAS allows the high seas commercial harvest of seals, providing guidelines under which sealing can be carried out, no State since 1987 has proposed a harvest. Thus the capacity in managing seals under CCAS has not been tested. Southern Ocean whales befell the same fate as their fur and elephant seal counterparts: exploitation to the verge of extinction.20 The International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (implemented by the International Whaling Commission, or IWC) came into force in 1948 as an effort to regulate the harvest of the world’s whales. As whale populations continued to plummet, environmentalists and scientists pushed for stronger protections, and in 1982 the IWC agreed on a moratorium, which came into force in 1987; by 1994, the IWC designated the entire Southern Ocean as a whale sanctuary. The Antarctic minke whale (Balaenoptera bonaerensis), for which the harvest had yet to have serious population impacts before the moratorium went into force, appears to have fully recovered.21 Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) are recovering rapidly,22 while other Antarctic baleen whale species are showing little or very slow recovery (for example, blue whales Balaenoptera musculus).23 Despite the Southern Ocean’s sanctuary status, Japan has harvested minke whales under a scientific allowance granted by the IWC since 1988.24 Due to IWC presence prior to the signing of the Antarctic Treaty and ancillary Conventions, the ATS has avoided the issue of whaling.

BRING IN THE MOTHERSHIP: THE RISE OF KRILL FISHING Just as states were ratifying the Antarctic Treaty, which set aside the entire continent for the sake of peace and science, they were sending industrial fishing fleets to the Southern Ocean, depleting fish stocks in their wake.25 The Treaty, which came into force in 1961, applied to the lands and ice shelves south of 60°S, but gave no capacity to manage the region’s marine living resources. By the early 1970s, under the industrial harvest of the USSR and others, fisheries at northern insular shelves, such as Kerguelen, South Shetlands and South Georgia, reached their peak the same year or a few years after fishing initiation.26 Around these shelves, populations of marbled rockcod, mackerel icefish and grey rockcod were quickly depleted well below commercial viability.27 A quote from Kock28 describes the situation well Their specific biological characteristics, such as slow growth rates and low fecundity, make Antarctic coastal fish particularly susceptible to overfishing. It is therefore not surprising . . . they were overexploited within a few years after the commencement of fishing, thus paralleling the history of whaling on a much shorter time scale as one of successive discovery, exploitation and depletion of each new stock.

Even after decades of no exploitation, marbled rockcod and other species remain at a fraction of their original biomass.29 But it’s worth noting that according to Heap30 the: eruption of fishing activity in the Antarctic did not, as was the case with whaling, arise from the perception that the Southern Ocean was a preferred fishing ground. It arose because the

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 424

21/12/2016 10:10

Fishing the bottom of the Earth  425 Soviet fishing fleet, one of the largest in the world, was being displaced from waters elsewhere as a result of developments in the [U.N.] law of the sea – 200-­mile fishing zones and Exclusive Economic Zones [EEZs].

With the depletion of these Antarctic finfish, the USSR began industrial fishing for krill, joined soon by Japan. The British Discovery Expeditions 1920–1950s, conducted to determine the environmental variables affecting the natural history of whales in the Southern Ocean, revealed the extraordinary distribution and abundance of krill.31 The depletion of stocks of krill-­eating whales following World War II led some scientists to hypothesize that there was a massive krill surplus (100 million tonnes (t) or more) that could provide an important source of protein for humans.32 While the USSR concentrated its efforts in the Scotia region (Area 48; Figure 27.1), Japan mainly fished off East Antarctica (Area 58 and 88; Figure 27.1); other states participated to a lesser degree.33 While Soviet vessels were able to catch and process large amounts of krill (~500,000 t per season),34 finding a market proved difficult. As summarized by Ainley and Pauly,35

Notes:  Circles proportional to respective. Total Allowable Catch (TAC) in tonnes in 2015/16; transparency indicates under-­utilization. Shaded circles around sub-­Antarctic islands reflect delineated Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) boundaries generated prior to the signing of CCAMLR. Shaded squares indicate toothfish management area around South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands region, managed by the United Kingdom but contested by Argentina.

Figure 27.1  CCAMLR management areas and Total Allowable Catch (TAC) for toothfish and krill

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 425

21/12/2016 10:10

426  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica in most trawl operations, krill are smashed into pulp and the catch then has to be processed immediately to avoid the rapid enzymatic breakdown releasing toxic fluorides. Thus krill has been more appropriate for fishmeal, rather than for human consumption. Nevertheless, the Soviets continued to catch krill, especially in Area 48 until their country’s break-­up in 1991, upon which remaining eastern-­block governments ceased to subsidize fleets. The annual catch steeply declined to ~80,000 t, with Japan taking the bulk of the catch, although Russia, Ukraine and Poland continued fishing.36 In recent years, the main krill fishery has remained in Area 48, with the total annual catch being ~200,000 t. Japan continues to harvest krill, as well as South Korea and Norway, the latter now dominating the effort.37 Norway, a leader in fishing and processing technology, has developed mechanisms for catching up to 800 t per vessel per day with their continuous pumping method. That technique also brings krill aboard alive and uncrushed, which enhances their market value.38 The value for krill products has also been increasing, particularly for their use in pharmaceuticals, especially omega-­3 fish oil supplements. The interest by other states in the krill fishery has also been on the rise. China is the newest entrant, potentially wanting to harvest krill for direct human consumption, as well as for aquaculture.39

CATCHING UP TO CONSERVATION: THE RISE OF CCAMLR Heeding the historical shadow of exploitation regulated only by market forces, the developing Antarctic krill fishery caused concern among Antarctic Treaty States about ecological impacts, particularly on depleted populations of krill-­dependent whales and seals.40 Through the initial efforts of SCAR, the Treaty Parties negotiated CCAMLR, which entered into force in 1982. To fulfill its articles, the Treaty Parties established a regulatory Commission and a scientific advisory body (SC-­CAMLR). Consistent with operational procedures of the Antarctic Treaty States, decisions by the Commission require a ­consensus of all members. CCAMLR applies to all marine organisms in the Southern Ocean, except for whales and seals, managed under IWC and CCAS, respectively. In line with its foundations in EBM, CCAMLR’s jurisdiction extends beyond the political 60°S boundary set by the Antarctic Treaty to include all waters south of the Antarctic Convergence (Figure 27.1). Many of the islands north of 60°S (but still within CCAMLR’s management zone) belonged to states having undisputed national sovereignty. Consequently, the Final Act of CCAMLR negotiations encouraged these states to comply with conservation measures adopted under CCAMLR, while recognizing their right to manage activities in their EEZs. CCAMLR has been celebrated as a progressive leader in high seas management for its ideals in employing precautionary EBM.41 Unlike other high seas management organizations, in which the primary target is single-­species fisheries, the explicit objective of CCAMLR was to conserve all Antarctic marine living resources, including the ‘maintenance of the ecological relationships between harvested, dependent and related populations of Antarctic marine living resources and the restoration of depleted populations’.42 This, then, is EBM. Yet meeting the goal of EBM, particularly if it stands to place ­limitations on fishing in the Southern Ocean, has become politically challenging.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 426

21/12/2016 10:10

Fishing the bottom of the Earth  427 While CCAMLR was founded with the goal of setting regulations for the growing krill fishery, a quota or limitation on krill was not agreed upon until 1991, almost ten years after CCAMLR came into force. Throughout that first decade, states actively discussed concerns about the krill fishery, including uncertainty about krill life history, abundance and distribution and its role in the ecosystem. However, whenever discussion of setting a limit arose, the main krill fishing states (Japan and USSR) ‘expressed the view that the introduction of precautionary limits on krill fishing in Subarea 48.3 was not yet justified because of the lack of estimates of the total biomass and potential yield.’43 Finally, during the 1991 CCAMLR meeting, States agreed by consensus to adopt a TAC for Antarctic krill in Area 48, and in the following year for Area 58 (Figure 27.1). By this time CCAMLR had also created its Ecosystem Monitoring Program (CEMP), which involved tracking the response of shore-­based krill predators (for example, fur seals and penguins) to variation in krill availability. CEMP, one of CCAMLR Commission’s greatest accomplishments and management tools, provided a means for true EBM. Hypothetically, the fishery TAC could be adjusted based on any measured impact on krill predators.44 Amid the success of the Commission adopting its first conservation measures, the USSR was collapsing, potentially creating a political window of opportunity. With the elimination of subsidized krill fishing, catches swiftly declined, ceasing by 1995. As the  USSR ceased fishing in Area 48, the preferred fishing grounds for krill, Japanese vessels shifted to that Area by the 1995 season.45 Of note is that the original krill TACs were set dramatically higher than catch levels, which may have also facilitated their adoption. The TAC for Area 48, set at 1.5 million tonnes, was more than four times higher than the take in 1991.46 Also in Area 58, the TAC was similarly set dramatically higher than the catch.47 While a TAC persists in Area 58, no notifications to fish for krill have been submitted since the 1990s. Prior to adopting TACs for krill, the Commission’s earliest conservation measures involved closing many areas to fin-­fishing (principally in Area 48). However, closing these areas faced little resistance since fin-­fishing was no longer economically feasible in those areas.

WHITE GOLD Toothfish, including both Patagonian and Antarctic toothfish, are by far the largest fish species in the Southern Ocean, growing in excess of two meters and 140 kg.48 Typical of deep-­dwelling fish, they are slow growing and late to mature,49 which increases their vulnerability to overfishing.50 However, toothfish went largely unnoticed from large-­scale exploitation until the late 1980s when they were spotted in Chilean fish markets by an American merchant and branded as ‘Chilean sea bass’. Despite prices fetching upwards of $50/kg, demand rapidly accelerated in the USA, Europe and Asia.51 The fish had acquired a new name, ‘White Gold’. By the early 1990s Patagonian waters were opened to international fleets and toothfish swiftly became fully exploited.52 To pace the growing demand, fishing companies began searching for toothfish farther south. Populations of Patagonian toothfish were found around almost every sub-­Antarctic and Antarctic island. While the presence of Antarctic toothfish in the Ross Sea was well known within scientific circles for decades,53 the first high seas toothfish fishery was developed in the Ross Sea (Area 88; Figure 27.1) by New Zealand, beginning in 1996. Catches swiftly increased,

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 427

21/12/2016 10:10

428  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica and an increasing number of states participated. Currently the ~3,500 t TAC set by the CCAMLR Commission is now taken by approximately twenty vessels from a dozen countries. Because the Commission has not yet developed a management strategy for regulating fishing capacity, the Ross Sea fishery has grown more crowded, despite requests that member states exhibit restraint.54 In a search for more toothfish, member states continue to pursue actively exploratory fishing in other regions. In 2002, exploratory fishing began in the East Antarctic (Areas 58.4.1 and 58.4.2; Figure 27.1). Most recently, in 2012, despite strong advice from SC-­CAMLR against fishing due to uncertain and potentially dangerous ice conditions, Russia initiated research fishing in the Weddell Sea (Area 48.5; Figure 27.1).55 Yet after two seasons, the reported toothfish catch data continue to be too anomalous to inform management decisions and the fishing in the Weddell Sea has been suspended.56

FISHING EFFECTS ON THE SOUTHERN OCEAN ECOSYSTEM: THE NEED FOR ECOSYSTEM-­BASED MANAGEMENT As noted by Ainley and Pauly,57 at least in regard to the coastal waters of the Scotia and Bellingshausen Seas, exploitation of the Southern Ocean began in the late eighteenth century matched very well the ‘fishing down the food web’ paradigm.58 Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, marine mammals were the first to be overexploited, followed by many species of fin-­fish before fishing fleets shifted to krill. The fin-­fish fishery experienced resurgence in the late 1980s when Patagonian toothfish from around South Georgia and other islands within the CCAMLR area were marketed and targeted by both legal and pirate fishing vessels.59 At Heard Island, repeating the pattern exhibited elsewhere, toothfish catches quickly peaked and then declined, although they have stabilized.60 The Patagonian toothfish fishery at South Georgia, initiated at about the same time, has also seen diminishing return, with the size at maturity of fish decreasing in response to fishery pressure.61 Further south, just ten years after exploitation was initiated in the Ross Sea, the fishery has begun to take increasingly smaller fish, the median size of which fell below that of mature fish by 2012.62 The CCAMLR Commission has been fully engaged, quite successfully, in EBM with regard to the krill fishery. Management was facilitated by a large scientific database stemming from the early work by SCAR as well as subsequent research directed at krill63 and CEMP. The Commission’s strategy abided by the EBM principles embedded in CCAMLR,64 justified by krill’s position as a critical forage species.65 The Commission’s target TAC allows fishing only to 75 per cent of krill spawning biomass,66 thus predating recent calls for such measures in other ‘forage fish’ fisheries.67 Even more precautionary, within Area 48, the 75 per cent trigger level is applied to small-­scale management units to disperse krill take to minimize the risk of altering CEMP benchmarks among krill-­ dependent seals and birds. Despite recent increases in harvest, krill catches have yet to approach the exploitation levels of the 1970s and early 1980s.68 As stressed by Heap69 and others,70 the historical high exploitation of krill and fin-­fish was a consequence of displaced fishing fleets needing to fill their holds. The Antarctic was not a preferred fishing ground, at least not until the discovery of toothfish. Despite its arguably successful record in managing the krill fishery, the CCAMLR

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 428

21/12/2016 10:10

Fishing the bottom of the Earth  429 Commission was unprepared for the toothfish fishery, owing especially to its rapid development and complicated by the presence of illegal fishing vessels. Its management of toothfish took on a single species MSY approach, with a goal of reducing the spawning biomass of various stocks to 50 per cent of pre-­fished levels within thirty-­five years.71 While an appreciable amount of information is known about the life history of Patagonian toothfish, thus to inform stock modeling,72 many knowledge gaps exist concerning Antarctic toothfish biology and life history, including frequency of spawning and natural mortality at all life stages (especially eggs, larvae and juveniles). Despite decades of fishing Antarctic toothfish, little direct research is being undertaken, other than what can be learned from the commercial catch.73 Based on the decrease in the median size of fish in the catch,74 the Ross Sea fishery is already within the 95 per cent confidence limits of a 50 per cent reduction in spawning biomass.75 The Ross Sea ecosystem may be experiencing adjustments to the loss of the large, neutrally buoyant fish, which are the prey of seals and whales and which compete with penguins, seals and whales for forage fish.76 Meanwhile overcapacity in an Olympic-­style ‘race-­to-­fish’ scheme has already led to vessels exceeding the TAC in the Ross Sea fishery.77 It may also have contributed to the many fishing vessel accidents in recent years related to the weather and ice. South Korea lost two vessels and others have required rescue, as have UK and Russian vessels.78 In their first year of fishing for toothfish outside of their ice-­free Heard Island EEZ, an Australian vessel in the 2015 season had to be rescued, as its propellers had been broken by the sea ice.79 The ‘Polar Code’, developed by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), is set to enter into force in early 2017.80 This Code sets new standards for vessels operating in both Arctic and Antarctic waters. However, it does not apply to fishing vessels.81 Further, consumer demand for toothfish continues to grow82 due to more toothfish stocks achieving the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) eco-­label, with other certifiers following suit, for example, Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch (SFW). These certifications were achieved despite substantial uncertainties concerning sustainability and ecosystem impacts of the fisheries.83 None of the certifiers have actually evaluated the fishery models, nor the data used in them, satisfied that CCAMLR’s Commission has done so adequately.84

MARINE PROTECTED AREAS AS A TOOL FOR ECOSYSTEM-­ BASED MANAGEMENT Marine protected areas (MPAs) limit or prohibit human exploitation and have become an increasingly valuable instrument in employing EBM for the long-­term health and sustainable use of oceans.85 To be effective, and especially in cases of high uncertainty or risk, MPAs must be large enough to protect key ecological processes and the life histories of resident animals.86 In addition to their large size, they should exclude or limit take, should be old (in place for longer than ten years), isolated and well enforced.87 Well-­designed MPAs can help reveal the impacts of and identify potential adaptive responses to climate change, which is especially important in the Southern Ocean given that portions are ­experiencing the most rapidly changing marine environments on Earth.88 MPAs have always been part of CCAMLR’s toolbox for employing EBM. Indeed, the Convention stipulates: ‘the designation of the opening and closing of areas, regions or

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 429

21/12/2016 10:10

430  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica sub-­regions for purposes of scientific study or conservation, including special areas for protection and scientific study.’89 However, recalling the precedents under CCAS (closing areas for science), general discussions of using MPAs did not commence until the 1990s.90 Then in 2002, states at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) called for the establishment of a network of representative MPAs throughout the world’s oceans by 2012.91 This international target has been extended to 2020 by states party to the Convention on Biological Diversity as part of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets.92 CCAMLR states committed to the WSSD goal in 2002, establishing an agenda item for discussing MPAs at future meetings.93 For the last decade, CCAMLR Member States have worked towards developing MPAs.94 In 2009, the Commission adopted its first MPA, a 94,000-­km2 area south of the South Orkneys (Figure 27.2). That MPA prohibits all fishing activities and waste disposal and discharge from all vessels within its boundaries and allows for improved coordination of scientific research activities. Despite being a no-­take reserve (the strictest classification

Notes:  Territorial claims are suspended from the signing of the Antarctic Treaty. The marine protected areas (MPAs) include areas adopted (South Orkneys) and those proposed at the 2015 CCAMLR annual meeting (Ross Sea Region, East Antarctic). MPA proponent states are listed in parentheses. MPA areas overlap or align with previously claimed areas, such as New Zealand’s Ross Dependency (Ross Sea MPA) and the territories claimed by Australia and France (East Antarctic MPA). Total area covered by approved MPAs is 94,000km2 and by proposed MPAs is >2,000,000km2.

Figure 27.2  Boundaries of historic Antarctic claims and CCAMLR marine protected areas

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 430

21/12/2016 10:10

Fishing the bottom of the Earth  431 for an MPA), key areas of high species biomass and diversity were excluded so as not to interfere with current and prospective fishing.95 This set a problematic precedent for the establishment of meaningful MPAs elsewhere within the CCAMLR area. Three MPA proposals were tabled in 2012, collectively amounting to more than four million km2, but thus far the Commission has failed to agree on any of them.96 One of the proposed MPAs, designed to protect the biota (for scientific study) around collapsing ice shelves, thus providing new habitat along the Antarctic Peninsula (put forward by the United Kingdom), was retracted in 2012.97 The two others, one in the Ross Sea (submitted by the United States and New Zealand; Figure 27.2) and that proposing protection of several areas off East Antarctica (originally submitted by Australia, later joined by France and the European Union; Figure 27.2), were proposed to protect biodiversity, as well as the structure and function of regional ecosystems. They included reference areas to gauge the impact of climate change and fishing on ecosystem change.98 None included the closure of current primary fishing areas. Despite extensive negotiations during 2012–2015, CCAMLR has failed to adopt any further MPAs. While the South Orkneys MPA was laid out so that it provided no threat to fishing, the MPAs in the East Antarctic and the Ross Sea would still allow current and possible future fisheries. In an institution where fishing states now significantly outnumber non-­fishing states, reaching consensus to limit fishing anywhere in the high seas portion of the Convention area has proved challenging.99 This may in part be due to the Antarctic being considered the most underexploited region of the worlds’ ocean. According to the FAO, almost 40 per cent of Antarctic fisheries are underdeveloped, while across the global oceans, almost 90 per cent of stocks are fully or over exploited.100 Even the CCAMLR Secretariat has promoted Southern Ocean fisheries as a sustainable global food source.101 Furthermore, many of the MPA proponents, including France, Australia and the United Kingdom, have EEZs (and associated MPAs) within the CCAMLR area. These states currently deliver the largest quantity of toothfish to the market and some, like France and Australia, fish almost exclusively in their sub-­Antarctic EEZs (Figure 27.1).102 The declaration of EEZs that harbor large stocks of toothfish within what would otherwise be the high seas creates political tension that rises to the surface during discussion over MPAs. Two-­thirds of the 15,000 t of toothfish caught in the CCAMLR area comes from EEZs. The majority of CCAMLR’s non-­EEZ (or high seas) catches comes from the Ross Sea with a TAC of about 3,500 t per year. The remaining high seas toothfish fisheries scattered throughout Areas 58 and 48 only allow for ~1000 t catches, total. CCAMLR states without access to the EEZs are forced to compete in the Ross Sea and to a lesser extent in these other small toothfish fisheries.103 Beyond its Heard Island EEZ, Australia also has legislation for an EEZ in the East Antarctic associated with its historic claim (Figure 27.2).104 While this EEZ and the land claims associated with it are not recognized by other states, proposing an MPA that has boundaries aligning with Australia’s territorial claim has raised concern among some members, voiced particularly by Russia, that MPAs are being used as a geopolitical tool rather than for conservation.105 The joint New Zealand and United States MPA is similar, having boundaries aligning with New Zealand’s claim of the Ross Dependency (Figure 27.2). New Zealand’s current plan, as noted, also includes the Balleny Islands, which New Zealand, in 1999, tried, unsuccessfully, to turn into an Antarctic Specially Managed Area with a sizeable associated marine area included. Some members viewed

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 431

21/12/2016 10:10

432  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica this as an effort to strengthen its claim and control access to fisheries in the Ross Sea, in that it happened shortly after New Zealand initiated the fishery there.106 New Zealand also has legislation for the establishment of an EEZ in the Ross Sea, but it is written in such a way that it would only come into play if the ATS disintegrated.107

CONCLUSION To many scientists and conservationists,108 the Ross Sea is one of our last remaining ocean wildernesses. It has the largest known high seas populations of toothfish, and many other species. Given the continued uncertainty concerning Antarctic toothfish life history, population dynamics and ecosystem role, particularly in a rapidly changing ocean, the CCAMLR Commission faces a critical need and unprecedented opportunity to implement EBM for toothfish in the Ross Sea. Yet, the rise of toothfish fisheries, which likely contributed to the increase in CCAMLR fishing states, may be challenging the very definition of ‘rational use’ in the Convention.109 Seemingly, rational use is best defined operationally in the way that krill are being managed, that is, based on science and a large, detailed database involving not just the krill stock and climatic factors affecting its variability, but also dependent species consistent with the full obligations of Article II. During negotiations over MPAs, which threaten lucrative fisheries, some states have misinterpreted the meaning of “rational use” and its relationship to conservation.110 CCAMLR foundational documents define rational use as ‘wise use’, ‘keeping for future use’, or management that will ‘result in an equitable distribution of benefits between present and future users of the resource.’111 The idea, indeed duty, of ensuring that there are resources left for the future echoes the foundational values of the Antarctic Treaty in setting aside the continent for the sake of peace and science, forever.112 While the application of rational use seems unclear, CCAMLR explicitly states: ‘for the purposes of this Convention, the term “conservation” includes rational use.’113 However, in reviewing annual Commission meeting reports over the period 1982 to 2015, we have seen a significant transformation of the term ‘rational use’. ●

From 1982 through 2000, conservation was primarily described as including rational use. Occasionally the relationship is described as conservation while allowing for rational use; ●● By 2004, some states began to stress that conservation needed to be balanced with rational use; ●● In 2008 and 2009, particularly over discussions of MPAs, it was stated that conservation should not compromise rational use; ●● In 2010 and 2011, the language shifted further, so that conservation must be ­balanced with rational use and some states raised concerns that MPAs, as a ­conservation tool, would prohibit, interfere with, or impact rational use; ●● During MPA negotiations in 2012 and 2013, some states reiterated that conservation must be balanced with rational use, and further argued that MPAs must maintain and ensure rational use; ● In 2014 and 2015, some states took this a step further in stressing that MPAs must not impact, must accommodate and must not restrict rational use.

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 432

21/12/2016 10:10

Fishing the bottom of the Earth  433 Thus, rational use, once used and defined within the CCAMLR Commission as being a tool of EBM, is now used in juxtaposition to it. Thereby its original meaning may be lost – it has been redefined by stealth. This change in definition is at the core of CCAMLR’s mandate. The use of MPAs, which are included within CCAMLR’s original articles, independent of attempts to protect the planet’s biodiversity, have been shown repeatedly to be part of EBM and the Convention’s drafters recognized this.114 In the history of Southern Ocean exploitation, we see that sealers and whalers only reduced their take when populations collapsed and when demand diminished. Similarly, many Antarctic fin-­fish species were fished to the point of collapse, with states ceasing fishing only when it became economically unfeasible to continue. When it came to setting krill catch limits, the Commission was in a different position. The demand for krill was low relative to krill biomass. Regulation could get ahead of the demand. Thus, politically, there was a window of opportunity, somewhat similar to that provided by the seals convention coming into force before any resumption of sealing. Yet, despite Southern Ocean MPAs providing an opportunity for EBM and contributing to rational use for toothfish, CCAMLR’s Commission may currently lack a political window of opportunity and the political will to reduce fishing for toothfish voluntarily while there are still fish to be found. There remains but a glimmer of hope that CCAMLR states have learned from the past and can manage toothfish rationally with the same standard and rigor that has been applied to krill. Unless they do, toothfish may share the fate of the seals, whales and other overfished fin-­fish in the Antarctic.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford University, the Price Fellowship and the Switzer Foundation for supporting Cassandra M. Brooks. David G. Ainley’s time was provided under a small grant from the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC), and NSF grant ANT-­0944411. Louise Blight provided many thoughts to help us to prepare this chapter. Bob Hofman provided valuable comments and edits.

NOTES   1. Fully exploited refers to a fishery operating at, or close to maximum sustainable yield, without room for further expansion. Over exploited refers to a fishery being harvested beyond a sustainable level and at a risk of stock collapse.   2. Watson and Pauly 2001; Pauly et al. 2005.   3. The Ross Sea is about 2,000 km from the nearest port in New Zealand.   4. Ainley and Pauly 2013; Pauly et al. 1998.   5. Halpern et al. 2008.   6. FAO 2011.   7. Grilly et al. 2015.   8. 20 May 1980, 1329 UNTS 48.   9. Kock 2007; Ainley and Pauly 2013.   10. High seas refers to areas beyond national jurisdiction.   11. These islands lie north of the Antarctic Treaty Area and are therefore not subject to the constraints around assertion of territorial sovereignty, generally the national sovereignty of these islands is

M4137-DODDS_Part 3 & 4.indd 433

21/12/2016 10:10

434  Handbook on the politics of Antarctica

  12.

  13.   14.   15.   16.   17.   18.   19.   20.   21.   22.   23.   24.   25.   26.   27.   28.   29.   30.   31.   32.   33.   34.  35.   36.   37.   38.   39.   40.   41.  42.  43.   44.   45.   46.   47.   48.   49.   50.   51.   52.   53.  54.  55.  56.  57.   58.

­ ndisputed– although Argentina contests the UK’s sovereignty over South Georgia and South Sandwich u Islands. Maximum sustainable yield, or MSY, aims to harvest a population at the hypothetical point that maintains maximum population growth rate, thus theoretically providing the largest yield over an indefinite period of time. Further theory says that cropping the spawning stock to a theoretically determined level increases recruitment and growth of younger fish, and the fishery then fishes the, again, hypothetical ‘surplus’ (that is, enhanced growth). Holt (2011), who developed and promoted MSY theory, now says it is the worst thing to have ever been foisted on fish stocks. Constable et al. 2000. Kock 2007; Hofman in press. In press. Kock 2007, Williams 1995. Laws 1994; Conroy and White 1973. Kock 2007; Hofman in press. 1 June 1972, 1080 UNTA 176. Tonnessen and Johnsen 1982; Kock 2007; Hofman in press. Branch 2006. Branch 2011. Branch et al. 2007. With the exception of the 2014/15 season, based on the ruling of the International Court of Justice that Japan should cease its scientific whaling. Japan resumed whaling in the 2015/16 season under a different scientific permit. Österblom and Folke 2015. Ainley and Blight 2009. In most cases to