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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Joenniemi & Sergunin
Towards a More Cooperative Pattern
At large, the constitutive themes grounding political space have changed profoundly in the North
since the end of the Cold War, and this goes particularly for Norwegian-Russian relations. The two
countries perceive each other as ‗partners‘ with a considerable amount of cooperation in various
fields. The agreement reached on a delimitation of the Barents Sea in 2010 has contributed
considerably to a decline in securitization and opened up more friendly and cooperative relations,
although within limits. The various environmental challenges as well as the different economic
options – pertaining above all to the extraction of oil and gas but also new shipping lines such as
those of the Northern Sea Route (Northeast Passage) – are of such a magnitude that the incentives
for cooperation have turned quite considerable. The constitutive discourse relates therefore
increasingly to various projects, particularly in fields related to the production of oil, gas and
shipping, and in general the significance of the northern areas to the national economies as well as
the dangers to be averted in the environmental field. For Norway, the northern areas have turned
into a strategic priority area in the sphere of the country‘s foreign policy as articulated for example in
the Government‘s Strategy of 2006 (The Norwegian Government‘s High North Strategy, 2006) and
updated in the 2009 document (New Building Blocks in the North, 2009). A similar development
has been discernible in Russia as evidenced by the emphasis placed on the Arctic region‘s
significance by the Government‘s Strategy for the Development of the Arctic Zone of the Russian
Federation issued in 2008 (Medvedev, 2008) and in a follow-up version published in 2013 (Putin,
2013). This implies in reality that the national diplomacies and municipal ‗paradiplomacies‘
conducted by various local actors such as Kirkenes and Nikel reinforce and compliment rather than
contradict each other.
It also follows from these that the northern areas have grown in centrality and are no longer, as used
to be the case, regarded as utterly peripheral in nature. It is to be noted, however, that the various
plans and predictions have not always materialized, at least not in the way initially thought and
expected. The different endeavors and plans pertaining to extensive cooperation may sometimes fail
or have to be postponed as shown clearly by the backlash experienced in the case of the Shtokman
gas and oil field with Norwegian Statoil giving up its shares in the field and the Russian companies
putting their plans for development on ice.
Twinning as a Development Strategy
Kirkenes in particular has been able to capitalize on the growing significance of the northern areas.
Rather than just being at the edge of Norway and of some importance due to national security, it has
increasingly turned into a hub for a variety of industrial activities, commercial services and tourism,
with considerable features of internationalization and a political center for different activities related
to the Barents Sea cooperation. It hosts, among other things, the International and Norwegian
Barents Secretariats and the Barents Institute. It is hence unsurprising that Nyseth and Viken (2009)
describe its current profile as pointing to ―miners and ministers‖ implying changes in terms of
industrialization as well as internationalization. The change is formidable as Kirkenes experienced
severe difficulties in the 1980s and with the mine being laid down in the mid-1990s. Instead of the