Public and National Imagination of the Arctic
This chapter examines how the Arctic has acted as a source of inspiration and how this plays into larger political challenges of the region today. The long history of southern perceptions and engagement with the Arctic is mainly a catalogue of fantastic t
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Public and National Imagination of the Arctic Derek Kane O’Leary
Simon Schama has written that “National identity would lose much of its ferocious enchantment without the mystique of a particular landscape tradition: its topography mapped, elaborated, and enriched as homeland.”1 In all nations, such mystique of course varies in orientation, scale, and aspiration. And in the Arctic, no two littoral nations diverge so much in this regard as the USA and Russia, historically and today. Yet, if the Eurasian behemoth has traditionally drawn far more in resources and identity from the Arctic, for both Russia and in North America, we may now hope that the Arctic land and seascape offer far less “ferocious enchantment” than it has. The USA has never been a meaningfully Arctic nation. Whatever one makes of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, the vast American continent exerted the greatest draw on the USA’s national, commercial, and human energies in the nineteenth century. More tepid incursions southward and northward in that century of consolidation faltered, and the fleeting age of sail in the antebellum hardly captivated the white American mind as did Manifest Destiny. By conscience, pragmatism, or prejudice, American colonialism overseas never inspired national pride and
D. K. O’Leary (*) History Department, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2018 G. F. Gresh (ed.), Eurasia’s Maritime Rise and Global Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71806-4_12
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energy in the same way as British, French, or Dutch varieties. In the far North, the mass excitement aroused by Arctic expeditions amounted to little formal expansion or development. Crucially, and in contrast to westward expansion, American ventures northward never enjoyed the robust and sustained endorsement of federal force, capital, and legitimacy deployed alongside massive corporate and individual interest. The continent has and still defines American politics, economy, and identity. Across the Pacific—or, indeed, the Arctic—today’s Russia has inherited an historical orientation toward its vast Arctic fringe. From the sixteenth- century tsarist incursions to extract Siberian resources, in Peter the Great’s scientific expeditions, through the fraught northern development projects in the Stalinist Soviet Union, and behind the Artic chauvinism of President Putin, a consistent inclusion of the Arctic in national identity and destiny is evident. Throughout, the great resources of the state have driven development of environments that have for millenia resisted rather than yielded to human endeavor there. While the seemingly providential resources of the American continent drew the nation westward, and massive port cities emerged on East then West Coast, Russian development would often be an Arctic and sub-Arctic affair, and the urge for viable seaports along its northern or far eastern Siberian fringe persistent. Though the Arctic environment undergoes startling change today, coveted commercial v
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