The Actorness of the European Union in Arctic Policymaking

No longer a distant frontier, the Arctic has become a space of concerns and opportunities for the people living in the region, as well as for external actors, due to climate change and increasing possibilities to further exploit Arctic resources. The EU is present in the region through its Arctic Council Member States, namely Sweden, Finland, and the Kingdom of Denmark (by virtue of Greenland and the Faroe Islands). However, the EU often appears to struggle to achieve the necessary legitimacy, identity, and strategies to be accepted as a credible Arctic actor. By combining the international relations theories of constructivism and critical geopolitics, this dissertation investigates the EU’s ‘actorness’, defined as an actor’s capacity to imagine its own and others’ roles in a policy context. Furthermore, this research proposes a revised use of the concept of actorness as a tool to understand the formulation of foreign policies, rather than their impact or effectiveness. Through extensive document analysis and the conduction of qualitative interviews, this study sheds light on how the actorness of the EU Commission, the EU Parliament, the Council of the European Union, and the EU Arctic Member States coherently constructs the EU’s capabilities to participate in Arctic governance, highlighting the convergence or divergence of their Arctic policies. This dissertation’s results show that the EU’s limited role is coherent with its Arctic Member States’ support for intergovernmental governance, and with the contradictory goals that all of them share –such as balance between environmental protection, exploitation of energy resources, and Indigenous Peoples’ rights. These ii conclusions suggest that Arctic governance is a complex matter for both the EU Institutions and the Arctic Member States, whose primary responsibility for the region’s welfare also suffers from fragmented visions of their roles in, and objectives for, the Arctic.