Proud of our conflicting norms in the Arctic: A hierarchy of norms vs emotions in EU’s Arctic Strategy

The EU has announced its long-awaited new Arctic strategy document on 13 October 2021, which angered Norway and the entire fossil fuel industry, and caused resentment among the indigenous peoples due to the support it revealed for the mining sector. This paper focuses on the EU’s Arctic Strategy as a distinct policy area and looks into its emotional setting to understand how the contradictory norms in its three sub-policy areas came into being, revealing a certain hierarchy of norms for the EU. A significant contribution expected from the study of emotions in European foreign policy is to explain how emotions contribute to the making of policy decisions, especially regarding crises. One of the aims of this workshop is to investigate the interaction between emotions and norms to explain what Karen Smith (2021) has named the ‘emotions-actions gap’ in European Foreign Policy. This paper argues that emotions trigger certain mechanisms that facilitate, enable, urge, or procrastinate certain policy decisions that are related to the norms these emotions entail, i.e. what Koschut (2018) calls ‘emotion-norms’. These emotion-norms in return determine which policy decisions are given primacy due an inherent hierarchy among them. By looking into the policy decisions in the EU’s Arctic Strategy and the emotions presented by its discourse, the paper searches what this hierarchy of norms have been in the making of the Arctic Strategy. A wide range of emotions can be found in the EU’s approach to the Arctic in the communication discourse surrounding the (making of the) Strategy: Pride in the EU’s climate change mitigation efforts and its leadership of green transformation, reluctance of bruising the interests of member states with indigenous communities, indecisiveness about promoting indigenous peoples’ rights in the region as well as a desire to have it all in one comprehensive policy. Firstly, the paper presents a discursive analysis of three-sub policy areas of the EU’s Arctic Strategy in sections devoted individually to each one of them: 1. foreign and security policy in the Arctic, 2. economic development in the region based on the priorities of the European Green Deal and its externalities for the Arctic region and 3. protection of indigenous peoples’ rights as an ‘upheld’ value. All these policy areas promote certain norms. The paper secondly relates the policy norms to the emotion discourse of the policy area and its inherent emotion-norm. Lastly, the paper merges the normative and discursive analysis of these three distinct sub-policy areas into a matrix. When merged within a single policy context, the Arctic strategy reveals that the EU is pursuing contradictory norms that impact the policy outcome. Based on an analysis of the three sub-policy areas for the driving forces of these policy areas, the paper is to reveal a certain hierarchy of norms within the EU’s Arctic Strategy that is linked to the emotions attached to these norms. Further case studies in the future can reveal whether such hierarchies of emotion-bound norms exist in the EU’s other foreign policy decisions.