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Coronavirus pandemic
This Week in AsiaOpinion
Irvin Studin
Irvin Studin

Opinion | How a new Arctic League can save the post-coronavirus world

  • Such a structure could prove to be the first major regional peacemaking institution of the 21st century
  • It would bring Washington, Beijing and Moscow under a common regulatory umbrella, and turn an imminent battlefield into a theatre of amity

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Icebergs near Kulusuk, Greenland. Photo: AP
Irvin Studin
The world that exits the Great Quarantine will be one of deep distrust and growing disintegration of international systems and structures. It will thus be in desperate need of institutional renovation and, yes, invention – to repair relationships across borders, spur economic growth, and avert the prospect of war among the great powers of the day, namely the United States, China and Russia.
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If the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) were arguably the two major regional peacemaking institutions of the second half of the 20th century, then let me propose that the first major regional peacemaking institution of the 21st century, post Covid-19, should be a massive “Arctic League”. This new Arctic League should include Canada; the US; Russia; several Northern European states, if not the entire EU; and, from Northeast Asia, China, Japan and the two Koreas.

The Asian states are evidently not, strictly speaking, “Arctic states”, but they are sometimes called “near-Arctic” or “quasi-Arctic” states. I include them for geopolitical reasons, as the Arctic League now includes all the major states threatening or otherwise required to secure global peace in the post-coronavirus world.

03:08

The Arctic League should be headquartered in the north of Canada – I suggest Whitehorse, in Yukon, or Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories. Indeed, I would submit that Canada, as one of the Arctic giants, could lead the brokering of this new institution, working from a founding document we might eventually call the Whitehorse Treaty.

Drawing loose inspiration from the medieval Hanseatic League, the new Arctic League would provide an organising framework and thick “rules of the game” for peaceful international commerce, transport, travel, science, culture, energy, people-to-people and environmental relations across the vast Arctic theatre that is opening up rapidly because of climate change and the melting of permafrost and sea ice.

Once it opens up, this Arctic area – via land, sea, air and space – suddenly becomes an intense thoroughfare for at least the three continents of North America, Europe and Asia, and leading (often nuclear) countries representing almost 3 billion people.

At present, the mechanisms to bind these continents, major states, significant populations and markets in sustained, productive and peaceful coexistence across the Arctic do not exist – the light-touch Arctic Council notwithstanding.

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