Individual leadership in the Arctic Council’s formation

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8.1 Individual leadership in the Arctic Council’s formation

All three different types of individual leadership emerged in the years preceding the formal adoption of the Ottawa Declaration in 1996. These leaders helped to solve the collective action problems that were present in the bargaining process of the Council and brought different actors with conflicting interests to a solution that was satisfactory to all parties involved.

An entrepreneurial leader uses negotiating skills to influence the way issues are presented in order to arrive at a mutually acceptable solution. Entrepreneurial leadership was provided by Canada’s top Arctic diplomat, Mary Simon, who was responsible for presenting the Canadian proposal to officials in Washington. Under Simon’s proposal, Canada agreed to exclude military affairs from the Council’s mandate, thereby removing the main obstacle to US participation. Simon also convinced US officials that indigenous groups should be part of the Council, though they would not have the same voting rights as states. This met the demands of both the US and Canada. Throughout the negotiations Simon used negotiating skills to arrive at a solution that was acceptable to both Canada and the Untied States.

A structural leader is an individual who acts in the name of a party in the bargaining process and uses that party’s structural power as bargaining leverage. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney provided structural leadership. Mulroney’s 1989 speech in Leningrad provided the structural and material support of the Canadian government to the negotiations. Once Prime Minister Mulroney made the offer of creating a Council and establishing the secretariat in Ottawa, it signaled to the other state actors involved that Canada was willing to use significant material resources to establish the regime. Joe Clark, the Minister of External Affairs, also acted as a structural leader. Clark put the diplomatic resources of Canada behind the proposed regime in 1990 and 1991 and was crucial in getting the support of the foreign ministers of the other Arctic States.

Intellectual leaders depend on the power of ideas to shape the way participants think about certain issues and how to conceptualize different solutions to the problem.

Intellectual leadership was provided by John Lamb, of the Canadian Centre for Arms Control and Disarmament, as well as Franklyn Griffiths and Rosemary Kuptana, who provided ideas and proposals for the eventual makeup of the Council to the Canadian

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government. Lamb’s CCACD report called for an annual multinational conference in the Arctic that would advise on science, the environment, economic development, cultural preservation and indigenous peoples. He also encouraged Mulroney to propose the idea of an Arctic Council on his trip to Leningrad in 1989. The report created by Griffiths and Kuptana, meanwhile, was influential in the Canadian government’s proposal for the Council at the AEPS ministerial meeting in Finland in June 1991. Griffiths and Kuptana, as well as Mary Simon, were also instrumental in advocating for the inclusion of indigenous peoples in the Council. Franklyn Griffiths, through his work at the Gordon Foundation, also got the support of Soviet scientists and convened numerous international conferences in Canada and the Soviet Union. Intellectual leadership, provided by John Lamb, Franklyn Griffiths, and Rosemary Kuptana, was present in the very early stages of the Arctic Council’s formation, before negotiations were brought into the public. The role of intellectual leadership in the earliest stages of regime formation is consistent with the hypothesis made by Young and Osherenko (1993a). The different individual leaders present in the Arctic Council’s formation are listed below:

Figure 4. Individual leaders in the formation of the Arctic Council

Name Leadership Position Role

Joe Clark Structural Can. Minister of External Affairs

Intellectual Head of CCACD Put Arctic Council on Brian Mulroney’s 1989 Leningrad trip Got the support of the other Arctic leaders in 1991

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Interaction with other variables

Individual leadership on the part of Canada shaped and in some cases was shaped by other factors of regime formation. This fits in with Young and Osherenko’s claim that leadership is a ‘cross-cutting’ factor, that is it can impact and be impacted by power relations and it is also impacted by the values and ideas discussed in knowledge-based theories (Young and Osherenko, 1993a).

Canadian leadership was certainly impacted by certain power-based factors, notably from the Soviet Union and the United States. The impact of the Soviet Union was largely conducive to regime formation. The willingness of the Soviets to engage in regime building gave a positive signal to civil society actors within Canada. Individual leadership also impacted power-based sources of regime formation. Not only did Canadian academics collaborate with Soviet academics and scientists to communicate their views, but enterprising Canadian officials also made overtures to their Soviet counterparts thereby establishing a base of support within the epistemic community in the Soviet Union.

As for the United States, power relations negatively impacted Canadian leadership. Not only did the proposals for a body to govern the Arctic not have the support of the United States, it was initially opposed to the idea. It was only after persistent diplomatic work, as well as some accommodation on military issues, that the United States reticently supported the regime. Although in the end some aspects of the Council had been ‘watered down’ by the demands of the US, the US nevertheless joined the regime and came to play a role in its workings. Individual leadership came to play an important role in getting the eventual support of the US. As shown in the preceding section, several individual leaders influenced the initial intransigence of the US. The formation of the Arctic Council also shows that individual leadership can be successful even if power-based factors are opposed to regime formation. The institutionalist hypothesis about cooperation (when there exists a common area of interest where cooperation is possible between states, the opportunity for mutual gains is more important than increasing relative power) seems to hold true in the case of the United States and the Arctic Council’s formation.

There was also interplay between Canadian leadership and knowledge-based sources of regime formation. The epistemic community of academics and scientists in Canada, led

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by the Gordon Foundation, CCACD, and Science for Peace, among others, had important connections with scientists in the Soviet Union as well as the other Arctic States. The multitude of international conference held between 1988 and 1993 helped bring together the two epistemic communities, who then became stakeholders in the prospective regime.

8.2 Middle power effectiveness: Canada and the Arctic Council’s