ArctiC-EUrope relations: A case-study of inter-regional co-construction and its geopolitical impacts

In October 2021, the European Union (EU) published its fourth Arctic policy, aiming for greater involvement in the Arctic due to climatic and geostrategic concerns. The EU’s position – both inside and outside the Arctic region – raises crucial questions about how we understand regions and their institutions as geopolitical actors. It was therefore necessary to complicate the main Eurocentric narrative of a political entity (the EU) engaging in a geographical area (the Arctic). In this thesis I propose a novel geopolitical approach, viewing EU-Arctic relations as interactions between two equivalent but distinct supra-national regions: the Arctic and its governance (“ArctiC”) and Europe and the EU (“EUrope”). This research introduces new tools to analyse complex political entities through regional theory, advancing our understanding of European geographical orderings and the geopolitical dynamics of supra-national regions. It shows how the ArctiC and EUrope interact and co-construct each other constantly at different scales. The thesis is divided into three parts. Part I outlines the theoretical framework and methods. I employed mixed qualitative methods, analysing policy documents, conducting Arctic conference ethnographies, and structured interviews, using a novel creative elite-interviewing method. Theoretically, I combined Anglo-Saxon critical geopolitics with the French/Lacoste school of geopolitics to create an analytical framework enabling inter-regional comparisons. Part II provides a historical analysis of ArctiC-EUrope relations pre-2008, adding context to current relations and tracing shifts in geopolitical imaginaries of the regions. Part III examines contemporary ArctiC-EUrope relations through maps and conferences. I show that maps not only fix spatial perceptions of regions but also create ontologically distinct regional spaces, necessitating different political actions. Arctic conferences contribute to the creation of a European Arctic sub-region as the major place in Arctic governance and to the blurring of regional limits. Integrating scales and temporalities, conferences are sites where we can study the meeting of EUrope and the ArctiC geographically, epistemologically and politically.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Canova, Emilie

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Powell, Richard

• Arctic
• critical geopolitics
• European Union
• region-building

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/9fba1b42-1375-4f11-8ebb-547b1a6ca096/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0009-0009-0713-6553

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/386159