The EU wants to move away from being a distant actor in its new Arctic policy, but can this fly with regional stakeholders? “As a geopolitical power, the EU has strategic and day-to-day interests, both in the European Arctic and the broader Arctic region,” the document states. The bottom line of the new policy is the EU’s push to protect the region from further disruptive climate change, securing its geopolitical standing through its Green Deal objectives. In the Arctic, the European Green Deal is a foreign policy tool. It could see the EU lead as a regulatory power or hope to resolve the ‘Arctic paradox’, the trade-off between pursuing economic opportunities and preventing environmental degradation through increasing commercialisation of the fragile region. Three Arctic states – Sweden, Finland and Denmark – officially stand behind the Commission’s proposal, but non-EU countries are not too pleased. The policy paper calls for a moratorium on fossil fuel exploration and extraction in the Arctic and pledges EU funds to speed up the green transition. In Reykjavík, where Arctic stakeholders gathered this weekend for one of the largest regional policy meetings, it proved divisive among regional stakeholders. The deal certainly ruffled the feathers of non-EU countries like Russia, Alaska, Norway, and Iceland. They argue there is a particular way of doing business in the Arctic and that there should have been more local consultation. In the consultation process, non-EU Arctic stakeholders had the opportunity to submit input to the new document – Norway has been one of the leaders in numbers of submissions – but the results were mixed. “We spoke to both the US and Russia on more than one occasion and discussed the future of the EU’s Arctic policy. And we obviously take into account what our partners say to us during these conversations,” EU’s lead foreign affairs spokesperson Peter Stano told EURACTIV. EURACTIV understands that both Washington and Moscow did not participate in the formal process. And why would they? The second issue relates to a geopolitical paradox: Keeping the region a “low tension”-area while facing increasing militarisation, in which, according to most Western stakeholders, one doesn’t necessarily exclude the other. The new document has aimed to provide clearer language on foreign and security policy, but this may not be enough in practice. “A wish is not the same as reality,” Andreas Østhagen, Senior Fellow at The Arctic Institute, told EURACTIV in Reykjavík. “The Arctic is not a backyard, it constantly influences what happens between Russia and NATO, with between China and EU or the US, and it needs to be treated like this,” he said. “However, despite the fact that the EU recognises that, it is unclear what the EU wants to do with it,” Østhagen said, adding that the same could be said about most geopolitical strategies the bloc has published in the past few years. So, what are the next steps? | 
