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Sverker Sörlin, miljöhistoria, KTH

Arctic Norden: Science, Diplomacy and the Formation of a Post-War European North

2007-2013

What follows below is the final report from the project "Arctic Norden: Science, Diplomacy and the Formation of a Post-War European North", which was part of the Nordic Spaces programme. Appendices A-C are included. A first draft version of the report was delivered for the final conference 24-26 August 2012 in Saarema, Estonia.

In the first part of the report I have responded to the questions raised in the instruction for the review. In the second part I elaborate on some aspects, including career formation of individual scholars, the implications of the main results including the third mission, and the significance of the project in the development of our Division's strategic vision for a broadening and more globally present environmental humanities.


Which was the aim of the project and has it been fulfilled? Has the project plan been adjusted?

The aim of the project was to study the formation of "Arctic Norden" as a composite of science, diplomacy, and policy in the Cold War context. We wanted to challenge conventional ideas of "Nordism" by pointing to its transnational extra territorial Arctic and North Atlantic dimensions. We also wanted to ask whether the conventional view of Norden as separated ideologically and politically by superpower tensions in the Cold War was valid within the realm of science and science diplomacy. Empirically we wished to study that through policy but also through the building of research cooperation, joint expeditions, scientific stations, and the possible connections between the laboratory, the field and the policy sphere.


 What are the three most important results of the project?

Our most valuable findings are related to the aim of the project. By and large we believe that we have corroborated our initial hypotheses. We have found strong evidence to suggest that the scientific sphere does not follow conventional lines of strong separation and tension between the major power blocks during the Cold War period. Instead we have found how science network live on and survive despite political and ideological differences.

Secondly we have found detailed evidence of the use of the geophysical and climate sciences in security and military advice. This is particularly true in the case of Swedish science diplomat Hans Ahlmann but other instances also occur.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, we have established the identity of a region north of 'Norden proper', a wider North Atlantic and Arctic realm, which has been an area for identity formation in the Nordic countries and which has served important geopolitical roles. Indeed, what 'Norden' is may not be the same if this wider realm is gaining recognition.


Has the project generated any new research problems?

Clearly, new research problems have been formulated. Furthermore, some of these have been transformed into new applications that have so to speak grown out of the present one. Thus, constellations of members of the Arctic Norden group have participated in successful projects funded by the European Science Foundation's BOREAS programme where relations between environment, empire, and science have been researched for the Arctic, and an ongoing programme, Arctic Futures, funded by MISTRA foundation in Sweden. In that programme our group is particularly interested in the role of assessments, prediction, forecasts, and other social technologies of claiming and politicising futures and expectations. We follow both the history of these 'genres' and their current practice and relations to the intensifying power game over Arctic resources and geopolitics.

One line of work has focused especially on prediction and modelling, both of climate and of other dimensions of change in the Arctic region. Formas has funded one such project 2009-2012.

These three are major projects, funded on a level of 5 to 10 million SEK (and the MISTRA initiative is up for a new funding period from 2014). This is not to diminish the value of other smaller initiatives and research problems that are pursued by individual scholars in our project.


7. Has the project generated any spin-off effects (for example, new research collaboration, new research ideas and applications)?

See question 6. We should also mention a range of collaborative publication projects that have led to works published by leading university presses (Yale UP, Palgrave, Ashgate, and special issues of peer reviewed journals).

We also consult with Nordforsk as they prepare for a major transdisciplinary Nordic "Noria-Net" funding initiative on the Arctic in collaboration with funding agencies in the Nordic countries and possibly elsewhere. Noria-Nets so far have typically been funded on the level of 60 to 120 NOK. Sverker Sörlin has assisted in that work serving as a resource person for the Nordforsk leadership with a special responsibility for integrating reports and ideas from three scientific expert groups covering all areas of science - technology, health, humanities, social and natural sciences - into a synthetic draft document for the Noria-Net board. This work has been ongoing since the late spring of 2012 and is expected to result in a decision by the Nordforsk board in June 2013.


8. How has co-operation within the project team, with other Nordic Spaces projects and with other researchers or research teams functioned?

Overall, the collaboration has been smooth and well functioning. Interaction with other project groups has been selective but when it has occurred, mostly on an individual basis, it has been rewarding. The set of volumes to be published by Ashgate was important in this regard because it meant that the project leaders got together more frequently and in discussion attempted to bring out the commonalities of the programme better than might have otherwise been the case. Now that the volumes have started to appear that effect is even more visible. At the time of final redrafting this report the first volume is already published and several others are well under way, including the one from the Arctic Norden-project, Science, Geoplitics and Culture in the Polar Region - Norden beyond Borders, which is due to come out in July or August 2013.


9. Has the project received complementary funding from sources outside the Nordic Spaces framework?

In a formal sense, no, this project has been self-sustaining. But in reality, yes, very much so. As already detailed under question 6 our research group has continuously developed and expanded and redirected our work within this research line with considerable grants from other competitive sources. We must say also that comparatively very little funding has come, at least up until recently, from core grants in the university system or by conventional research funding agencies. We have pondered more and more whether not the significant growth of knowledge and competencies in these fields - geopolitics of science and diplomacy in the Nordic region - should be an interesting object of investment somewhere in the Swedish academic system.

However, a certain shift may be discerned as Mistra has recently (December 2012) released a call for research on Arctic Sustainable Development, just like the now running Arctic Futures programme with a focus on the humanities and social sciences. Mistra has called for a minimum of 25% co-funding for the new programme, in addition towards subsidies for real university overheads. In practice this has meant that research environments around Sweden, and their international partners, have had to ask themselves whether they should invest in this field and the answer so far seems to be that some have said "yes, we will". The research group that derives from the Arctic Norden project, largely based at the Division of History at KTH, is now a major partner with Umeå University's center for Arctic studies, ARCUM, in bidding for the new Mistra programme of a total on nearly 40 MSEK (with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Sipri, and the Stockholm Environment Institute, SEI as junior partners along with a research group in St Petersburg and individual scholars in the Nordic countries and the UK). There is reason to assume that other Swedish institutions have also engaged in the bidding (which has a 5 April deadline and so is yet undisclosed).


10. Financial accounts. Are there any major divergences from the original plan? In that case, which ones and why?

No major divergences have occurred.

PART II

Arctic Norden:
Science, Diplomacy and the Formation of a Post-War European North

This project had as its objective a study of the formation of "Arctic Norden" as a composite of science, diplomacy, and policy in the Cold War context. The empirical focus was on Swedish and Norwegian science relations in the fields of meteorology and glaciology and its contributions to policy and diplomacy, but the perspective included a wider North Atlantic realm and aimed to explore possible links with the Soviet Union.

The project was granted funding for three years, from October 2007 to October 2010. Disposition time was since prolonged until 2011 (and in practice into the first months of 2012). Four salaried researchers were planned to work in the project: Lisbeth Lewander, University of Gothenburg, Anders Houltz, KTH, Ola Anders Röberg, University of Oslo, and Sverker Sörlin, KTH. For health reasons Röberg has not been able to participate. Instead Peder Roberts (PhD Stanford 2010) participated in the project since 2010. Two scholars participated as associated researchers, Urban Wråkberg, Barents Institute Kirkenes, and Jessica Shadian, first at Cambridge University, later at Bodö University College. Through the Ashgate book project several more scholars in Denmark, the UK, South Africa, Russia, and Norway joined the project as chapter authors.


Common activities
Work in the project has been intense with designated project meetings held in Stockholm (November 2007, January and June 2008), Umeå (October 2008), Gothenburg (June 2009), Oslo (June 2010). On top of this minority constellations of the project team met on several occasions in the context of other workshops and conferences. A small planning meeting for the book project was organized in Stockholm in November 2010. The 'book group' of project leaders had several meetings during 2010 and 2011.

The Arctic Norden team organised a session at the IPY Arctic Human Dimensions conference in Umeå 3 October 2008, "Science, Diplomacy and the Formation of a Post-War European North", including papers by Sörlin, Lewander, Wråkberg and Shadian. Members of the team have also presented research at the 4th meeting of the International Arctic Social Science Association, IASSA, meeting at Nuuk, Greenland, in August 2008, at a special Arctic session of the American Society for Environmental History meeting in Tallahassee, Florida, in February 2009, and on many other occasions which will appear from the individual lists of activities. Several activities have related to the International Polar Year 2007-2008, for example presentations at designated Nordic conferences in Stockholm in 2008 and 2009 (twice). The group has also been represented at both major IPY follow up conferences in Oslo June 2010 and in Montreal April 2012. Many other conference activities are listed in appendices (A-B).

Publishing and special initiatives

Publishing has been very active thanks to a high level of research activity among the participants and to the fact that several in the team have an ongoing work in the field which was reinforced under the current grant and focused on the new set of issues that the project addressed.

The project expanded eastward, beyond the project plan, to include Scandinavian-Soviet contacts in the geophysical sciences and their diplomatic ramifications. This is thanks largely to the collaboration that Sörlin has undertaken with Dr Julia Lajus at the European University in St Petersburg. Lajus was a visiting scholar at KTH in the spring and fall semesters of 2008 and has now co-authored two papers with Sörlin on this topic, one intended for a special issue of the International Journal of Historical Geography and one for book publication (both are forthcoming). Lajus has also been instrumental in collaboration towards an ongoing MISTRA grant for similar research issues on "Arctic Futures" (see Part I above).

Under the current grant Shadian also visited KTH in the Spring semester of 2008 and did work on various approaches in the project, ranging from the study of field stations and native communities, across to UNESCO and Millennium Assessment related activities in Arctic nature and conservation policies, and more general policy and governance issues. Both Shadian and Lajus gave papers in the Division seminars.

Peder Roberts has been a frequent visitor and is spending a postdoc in the Division of History at KTH 2012-2014.


Individual research and other activities
The individual work of the project scholars have by and large followed the project plans.

Sörlin

As already mentioned Sörlin has expanded his work to include the Soviet links of Scandinavian geophysical science. He has also developed a more detailed picture of the diplomatic situation in the North Atlantic in the Cold War based on work in the Norwegian Foreign Office Archives and in Sweden e.g. the War Archives (Krigsarkivet). A first paper was presented at the IASSA conference at Nuuk in August 2008. A first longer publication on the diplomatic work of Ahlmann was published in late 2008 (in Swedish), and some more in a slightly different context in early 2009 (Journal of Historical Geography 2009:2). Sörlin has also explored Icelandic archives in a field work period in July 2008 which has revealed further details on links between science and politics in the activities of Hans Ahlmann and members of his North Atlantic network. With Lajus he has worked on Russian/USSR archival materials and increasingly on sources in American archives. The work towards a full length academic book on Ahlmann is still ongoing and separate thematic conference papers and journal or book chapter publications appear continuously (see Appendix A).

Lewander

Lewander, who sadly passed away in early 2012, had a wide range of activities in the programme, linking politics and diplomacy in particular to issues of gender in science. Her activities spanned ongoing work on Nordic cooperation and security issues in Antarctica and work on risk and security issues and Nordic policies in the Arctic. Some publications appeared in that later area as well and a stronger focus on the Arctic was developed in the latter part of the project period. Several important publications came from that line of work. She also worked on the intersection between Arctic science in the service of politics, risk and the development of the Law of the Sea. She also led the work of an exhibition on early polar research for the Maritime Museum in Göteborg, funded under the IPY. Further she worked on a website on polar research directed towards researchers in social and cultural sciences (funded by the national Council of Sciences). At the end of her work in the project she conducted field work in Iceland, Greenland, Norway and Svalbard as well as Canada which was published in the RJ Norden yearbook 2011 and will appear in the edited Ashgate volume (posthumously).

Houltz

Houltz's subproject compares two museums of polar exploration, both founded in the 1930s but based on well-known expeditions dating back to the decades around 1900. The first is the Fram Museum in Oslo, centred around the famous Norwegian polar ship, the second is the Andrée Museum in Gränna, combining accounts of the ill-fated balloon expedition with a polar centre reflecting more recent polar research activities. Houltz asks questions such as: What does it mean to be a modern polar nation? And how is such an identity expressed in cultural terms? In which ways can museum institutions and exhibitions be used as means for such expressions? How do "the grand narratives" of Sweden and Norway relate to the epic representations of polar activities, presented by the museums? From this work he has published two articles. He has also combined field trips, oral history, and archival research. He has demonstrated that the treatment of Arctic collections in the two countries display significant differences as to national trajectories and, thus, differences in the appropriation of Nordic identity as well.

Wråkberg

Wråkberg was originally supposed to work on the IPY Kinnvika activities but for a number of reasons, mostly lack of funding, this project did not prove possible. On the other hand Wråkberg has been able to focus more on Nordic-Soviet/Russian relations including science, industry and natural resources in the Barents region and the Arctic. Wråkberg has also been working on national differences and Nordic cooperation in Arctic preservation of cultural and scientific heritage with a focus on Svalbard. In both areas there have been both conference presentations and printed publications. He has also been spearheading an ESF project, "Colonialism, Environment, Empire 2008-2010" (co-directed with Ron E. Doel at Florida State University), which had strong links to Arctic Norden.

Shadian

One line of Shadian's work is on new forms of "intellectual sovereignty" in Arctic science. Her start off point was the observation that there is a vastly changing political context surrounding scientific sites of production, in the field or in the laboratory. This has taken her to study Arctic field stations as well as various international collaborations. She has also done work on the shifts in the Arctic policy regime in the Cold War and post Cold War contexts, involving the agency of new non state-actors, the permeability of state borders as regards the flow of people, money and environmental degradation, and redefinition of national narratives to fit the expansion and emergence of new regional political spaces. She also embarked on work on the role of Greenland and its place in Arctic Norden, first during the period 1945-1970 when Greenland formed part of a Cold War colonial situation, and secondly in the more recent period when decolonisation and increasing independence means a new relation to Arctic Norden, as demonstrated in her contribution to the Ashgate-volume. She also co-edited a volume on her own, also for Ashgate (2009).

Röberg

Röberg could not participate in the project. He was replaced by Roberts.

Peder Roberts

Roberts graduated from Stanford University in 2010 after dissertation work on the science politics of Antarctica and the emergence of new styles of polar research in the middle of the twentieth century; his ensuing book book was published as The European Antarctic: Science and Strategy in Scandinavia and the British Empire (New York: Palgrave, 2011). He speaks Scandinavian languages and works with ease in Nordic archives. He quickly adapted to the high work pace in the project and has published widely on bipolar issues, Danish policies for Greenland, and on comparative Scandinavian science policies for the Arctic. He is currently part of the Mistra Arctic Futures programme, has already applied (successfully) for an initiation grant from RJ, and is now applying for a VR grant 2013 to work on comparative polar policies in several Arctic Council member countries. This last grant is submitted together with Lize-Marié van der Watt (originally from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa), who has also joined the KTH research group (alongside with a part time position at the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat). The fact that both these scholars are now part of our research team can only be understood as further evidence of the fact that the Nordic Spaces grant allowed us to start building a sustained research line on polar science, environment, and geopolitics.

Main findings

The project solidifies the original idea that the Arctic forms a significant, yet undervalued, dimension of "Norden" in the decades after WWII. It does so in a quite paradoxical way since it is very clear that in geopolitical and security terms the Nordic countries pursue quite different agendas in the Arctic. This vast space is therefore loaded with interests and tensions between states, adding to the overarching NATO-Soviet dimension. Our view is that science, although it is mobilized to support national and NATO interests, at the same time performs a range of less official bridge-building efforts that in some instances may well be called "Nordic". Science networks tend to be functional even in times of conflict and they build alliances and relations that are less vulnerable to daily conjunctures of politics. Arctic Norden is therefore to a considerable extent an informal scientific Norden of well placed scientists that at the same time extend their efforts to the Soviet Union and the United States and Canada. In particular, research in the project has demonstrated a close collaborative work between Nordic and Soviet scientists the extent and character of which was hitherto not described and only known among a handful of elderly specialists in the geophysical sciences.

The spirit of Nordism seems also to be quite prevalent among the protagonists of our research. They share a sense of common cause in making the Arctic a common interest for Nordic states and for meaningful and considerate use, avoiding unnecessary conflict, and coining the message that the Arctic is an asset for the planet and for mankind, a stereotype that was in circulation even before 1945 but certainly was reinforced in the post WWII period.

Importantly, it should be added that some of the most elaborate and comprehensive versions of these results have occurred as the researchers themselves have moved on to engage in wider research constellations. One of those is a special issue of the Journal of Historical Geography (technically still in review but in reality in advanced stages of revision for publication). Of a total of six major articles it is here most relevant to mention a co-authored lead contribution, "Building Empires of Natural Knowledge: State Aims, National Strategies, and Arctic Natural Sciences Research, 1930s-1960s", with Sörlin and Wråkberg from the Arctic Norden project (Ron E. Doel lead author). This is a broad comparative analysis of how various national and other Arctic interests have been performed by science. The article represents a kind of work that did not exist before and which provides a synthesis of existing knowledge on the subject, including that which was brought from Arctic Norden.

Third mission

We said in the proposal that the project team has considerable experience of third mission and outreach activities in several media which will be utilized appropriately. This has already proven true. Most significantly the team has spearheaded an effort to initiate an exhibition project to visualize and highlight new images of the Arctic, including the role of science and the Nordic cooperative dimension. The project, entitled "Arctic representations", was funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers and is coordinated by Houltz (still ongoing).

Members of the group have been among the most frequent in media coverage of Arctic issues in Sweden. There has also been considerable stakeholder interaction relating to developments in the Barents region (Wråkberg) and in the IPY (Sörlin).


Several of the project members have had a strong career development in Nordic and/or Arctic research or related fields that at least partly can be attributed to the project and the Nordic Spaces programme. Here are some examples:

- Roberts has been a member of an ERC grant on ocean science and surveillance coordinated by Manchester University, and is extending new research networks in polar science diplomacy research. He is part of an upstarting Scandinavian-Russian research project lead from Tromsö University.
- Sörlin has been the PI of several following grants and has been entrusted with several positions in environmental and science policy advice, often related to Arctic issues. He was the President of the Swedish Committee for The Fourth International Polar Year 2007-2009.
- Wråkberg has assumed an affiliation with Tromsö University and is a visiting scholar in the Division of History at KTH during spring of 2013.
- Shadian has joined the faculty of the University of Lapland, Rovaniemi.

All scholars in the project still pursue active, in several instances impressive careers within the wider realm of the research field covered in the project.

Taking stock of the long term effects of the project

Let me finally expand on some of the wider effects of the project and its research line, in ways that is easier to do now when some time has passed since the project started and even concluded (although some smaller activities are still ongoing).

Internally, in the Division, our research line has resulted in strengthened relations with a dynamic group working on energy history, -infrastructures and what is termed "energy geopolitics" in a historical perspective. This group has now started to collaborate with the 'Arctic' group on themes of common interest, allowing for synergies, co-authored papers and with cooperation in teaching as well. A flagship volume from the Arctic research team to be published later this year, When the Ice Breaks: Media, Science, and the Politics of Climate Change, co-edited by Miyase Christensen, Annika Nilsson, and Nina Wormbs (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, in press), has an article by Dag Avango and Per Högselius, none of them formally with the Arctic Norden project but part of the growing wider collaboration harvesting work on energy and technology studies of the Soviet Arctic with very fruitful results on the overall understanding. It could be mentioned that Högselius has recently published a book of his own on the energy geopolitics of natural gas, Red Gas (London: Palgrave MacMillan 2013), and Avango has a volume in preparation on the role of heritage and history in polar geopolitics, a work that also engages one of the PhD students that we have been able to recruit, Eric Paglia, also at the UI Foreign Policy Institute, who studies the uses of history for making political claims in the Arctic. Miyase Christensen, a media scholar who recently was appointed professor at the School of Journalism (JMK) at Stockholm University, was recruited under our Formas grant and will stay in the Division as visiting Professor 2013 to 2016. Finally, a recent VR project has been granted on remote sensing technologies and environmental monitoring with the Arctic as a key empirical case (by Nina Wormbs and Sabine Höhler).

To mention these sprouting spin off effects is not to argue, of course, that the Arctic Norden project should claim honour of the performance and results that have come under different projects, programmes and funding schemes and by different scholars. On the contrary, they all have their story to tell of how they formulated their goals and have strived to reach them. What is argued here is nothing more or nothing less than the fact that there have been key synergies achieved with the Arctic Norden grant and that these synergies deserve to be spelled out in some detail in order to capture the real effects of the Nordic Spaces effort. The very nature of these effects of the funding, and of the project, is thus what could be called its 'strategically unplanned value added'. These added values are unplanned in the sense that they were by and large not intended when the project was conceived (although by experience we know that such benevolent effects do sometimes happen). They are nonetheless strategic insofar as they are the result of strategic priorities. It was a priority to expand on this research line which hitherto had only had smaller activity; some industrial heritage work under Marie Nisser and Dag Avango, and Sverker Sörlin's long standing interest in Arctic science and politics. The strategic dimension was crucial to be able to take the risk in staff hirings and in the building of networks and, ultimately, in prioritizing internal funds to secure the long-term viability of the research field.

This is not to diminish the role of planning and leadership in the project, but my emphasis is rather not on that as the work of an individual, nor even of the individual scholars in the team, but rather on the possible effects of concerted thinking on how to build research lines in a humanities department, in a funding environment which is generally speaking less generous than in most other fields.

It only remains to mention one more factor, which is the crucial role of internal strategy work in the Division of History. Had it not been for that strategic vision - work that started 2006/2007 - and the ambitions to integrate many strands of history, and neighbouring fields, into a wider 'environmental humanities', it would have been less obvious that a broad effort on Arctic and Nordic research would have made sense at all. The Arctic focus was, furthermore, something that we located as one area of many that are particularly interesting as result of interconnected global change and which we deemed merited to be studied in its relations to other parts of the world - through commodity markets, trade, climate change, ocean temperatures, resource exploitation, migration, security. This is true for several regions in the world but it is of course especially important for the Nordic region, with its geographical proximity and the fact that such large portions of the Nordic countries are Arctic. To understand this dimension of Nordic history and politics is not to consider a marginal phenomenon to the north, it is to understand a major feature of what is 'Norden' to the wider world, and that feature may grow even more significant in the future.

The Arctic is thus, in our strategic perspective, not a narrowing down of our interest to a smaller and limited geography, rather it is part of a process of globalizing our domain of history and making our work more relevant, both scholarly with a far more ambitious international publishing agenda and in relation to society at large where we want to contribute and be part of dialogues and impact with our results and ideas. To achieve this, the Arctic Norden grant came at a crucial moment and served a catalytic function.