Antarctica: View from a Gateway.

• Author: Simpson, Alan K.

Author: Stuart Prior Published by: Centre for Strategic Studies, Working Papers, Wellington, 1997, 28pp, $5.

The sheer size of the Antarctic, together with its surrounding oceans, makes it an area of enormous importance to the globe. The last great continent of exploration and adventure is now generally recognised as critical to the twenty-first century, as the world's main climatic motor, a region of considerable marine living resources, and a region of considerable non-living resources. As our decidedly sketchy understanding of the Antarctic grows we will come to grasp its enormity, complexity, and importance.

The Antarctic did not fit the state-centric conventions in international affairs and at this level, too, presented a challenge. Ever creative and adaptable, the state-centric system developed a hybrid -- the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) -- to handle the unique situation. Under the ATS umbrella ardent opponents in the Cold War, the Falklands War, and numerous other international crises worked around the same table to develop a common mind on how best to exercise their self-appointed status as guardians of the Antarctic. Yet it was the non-state actors, not the state actors, which effectively ended the almost 30 years of unprecedented international co-operation. A handful of self-appointed environmental organisations, exploiting the new political forces they themselves had done much to create, cut the ground from under the ATS in the late 1980s. The 1991 Madrid Protocol emerged from the period of Antarctic confusion following the rejection of the 1988 Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activity (CRAMRA). In effect, the Madrid Protocol left the Antarctic more vulnerable than before, as environmental non-governmental organisations revealed their narrowness by failing to recognise that their differences with government policy-makers were over tactics, not ends.

Given the unhappy recent past, it is very welcome to have Stuart Prior's paper, Antarctica: View from a Gateway, to bring us back on course and to remind us of an area of considerable interest and importance to New Zealand. It is very welcome to realise the Antarctic has been restored to the government's list of important policy areas.

In this Centre for Strategic Studies Working Paper, Prior aims to outline both the main issues around which policy has proceeded -- the main actors, the ATS framework and process, the issues and developments -- and New...