Germany has been traditionally a land power. Unlike some of its neighbours such as the Netherlands, Denmark and France, which used to have remarkable overseas empires, German expansion occurred mostly by land, in particularly eastwards – see Drang nach Osten – while its colonial empire was short-lived and left few traces. Nor did Germany or any German state play any major role during the Age of Discovery. Germany and its predecessor states have been occasionally able to project sea power, as shown by the Anglo-German Naval Race which preceeded WWI, but usually for a short time: the only instance of long-lasting German maritime power was the Hanseatic League, a powerful net of merchant cities initiated by the Baltic city of Lübeck which dominated sea trade in the North and Baltic Seas in the late Middle Ages. But, even in this case, we should remember that some of the main Hanseatic cities were located in territories previously affected by the Drang nach Osten like Pomerania, Prussia, Estonia and Livonia.
The land nature of German power can be easily explained by geography. Located in the centre of the Western European peninsula, with the only natural barriers being the Alps in the south and the North and Baltic Seas in the north, the Germans found few obstacles in their land expansion, especially eastwards, at least until the rise of the Novgorod Republic and of Poland-Lithuania (France, on the other hand, has always posed a formidable obstacle to Germany’s expansion westwards – and to its traditional ambition to dominate Europe). This allowed some of the main German states – the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, the Kingdom of Prussia, the North German Confederation and ultimately Germany itself – to develop as mighty land powers, whose borders extended at their height “from the Meuse to the Memel”, as put by the (now taboo) first stanza of the German national anthem. But, at the same time, Germany’s access to the sea is very constrained. The Baltic Sea is a relatively small and almost closed basin, whose keys are traditionally held by Denmark, Sweden and – by a lesser extent – Norway (through the Skagerrak), while in the North Sea, through which they could theoretically expand overseas and build a colonial empire – as they did, albeit for a short while –, German states would have faced full-fledged maritime powers such as Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and last but not least the United Kingdom, whose blockade on Germany during the WWI effectively prevented ships from countries outside the North Sea basin to reach the German ports and vice versa.
Still, the access to the North Sea implied automatically a Teutonic Arctic outreach, especially since the Unification of Germany, which led to prominent results from a scientific point of view. Between 1868 and 1870, Carl Koldewey led two Arctic expeditions to Greenland and the Svalbard Islands, while between 1882 and 1883 the then-Director of the German Maritime Observatory Georg Neumayerorganised the First International Polar Year, during which scientists from 11 European countries and the USA conducted studies in both Arctic and Antarctic regions. German diasporas in countries like the United States and the Russian Empire also played a main role in Arctic studies during those years, as shown by the climatic classification introduced by the Russian-German geographer Wladimir Köppen in 1884 (still the most used one). Köppen’s climate classification, which also includes polar and subpolar climates, would have given great stimuli to the subsequent German Arctic studies.
During the first half of the 20th century, the father of the continental drift theory, Alfred Wegener, led three expeditions to Greenland (in 1906, 1912 and 1930), aimed at exploring the glaciers and climatic patterns of the island. In the first one, inspired by the climatic classification introduced by his mentor (and future father-in-law) Wladimir Köppen, Wegener set up the first Greenlandic weather station in Danmarkshavn, on the east coast of the island, still in use; while the second expedition, aimed at the remote Queen Louise Land, was the first one to cross the Greenlandic ice sheet. The final expedition, aimed at studying the Greenland ice cap, allowed one of the first measurements of ice cap climates thanks to the construction of a weather station in Eismitte; but it was fatal for Wegener, who died nearby in November 1930.
During the subsequent Nazi parabola, German interest for the Arctic assumed a territorial dimension as well: in 1940, Nazi Germany occupied Norway and set up a collaborationist regime led by Vidkun Quisling. Norway remained formally independent, but it was due to be ultimately annexed by the Greater German Reich both because of its strategic value and because its people were seen as tools to improve Germany’s genetic stock (unlike most of the peoples they conquered, Norwegians were seen as racially superior to Germans). In the meanwhile, Nazi Germany raised a claim on an Antarctic region which they called New Swabia.
After the German capitulation, the Operation Paperclip drove more than 1,600 scientists, engineers, and technicians from Germany to the United States between 1945 and 1959, while an analogous operation was carried out by the Soviet Union in their occupation zone (Operation Osoaviakhim). This, together perhaps to the feelings of guilt which tormented the German people after WWII and their dramatic U-turn from militarism to pacifism, explain not only why the two new German states dropped their predecessor’s Antarctic claims, but also why they have been virtually absent from the Poles for many years after the end of the war. Even the Svalbard Treaty, signed by Weimar Germany in 1925, was not rejoined by any of the German state for a long time.
German involvement in the Arctic (and the Antarctic) restarted in the 1970’s. East Germany, which got back most of the relocated scientists during the 1950’s, had a certain advantage: it rejoined the Svalbard Treaty in 1974, and in the same year it became the first German state to join the Antarctic Treaty. The German Democratic Republic also set up the first German Antarctic research station in 1976, namely the Georg Forster Station, followed up by its Western counterpart in 1980, one year after joining the Antarctic Treaty itself. West Germany, nevertheless, was all but inactive. In 1973, the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) started a polar research programme, followed by the Alfred-Wegener-Institut (AWI) in 1980. These years were also characterised by the development of some interest in the raw material deposits of the Arctic region.
The reunification meant for Germany also a unified policy in both poles. The Georg Forster Station was closed in 1993, while the Svalbard Treaty, never signed by West Germany, is now valid for Germany as a whole. Climate change, the opening of new transport ways and the need for new raw material deposits are now driving a greater interest towards the Arctic (Antarctica is a totally different matter) from many countries, including Germany. But, at this point, we are no longer talking about history.
We’ve seen that Germany’s interest in the Arctic has been historically mostly scientific, while economic interests – which we are going to analyse more deeply in the following part – only developed in the second postwar, with different timings for East and West Germany. Geopolitical ambitions appeared for a very short period, with the German occupation and planned annexation of Norway, and – if we exclude the term “quisling” as a synonym of “collaborationist” – they had very few long-lasting consequences, although they may have influenced Norway’s decision to join NATO in 1949, rather than to stay neutral like its Swedish and Finnish neighbours, since nobody intervened on Norway’s side when the country came under German occupation. But the ongoing changes in the Arctic region have led Germany to adopt an official Arctic policy, to become an observer state in the Arctic Council in 1998 and to open a German Arctic Office in 2017.
The six current priorities of Germany’s Arctic policy, as stated on the white paper published by the Federal Government on 18th September 2024, are the following ones:
A main difference with the previous versions is the role played by geopolitics. The 2013 white paper, for instance, defined the Arctic as “a region in transition”; but climate change, rather than any change in the world order, was considered to be its main trigger. Global warming, in turn, was seen as a source of both opportunities and risks, with Germany looking with concern at phenomena like the increase of the sea level but also with interest at the opportunities offered by the greater accessibility of the Northern Sea Route (henceforth NSR) and of local oil and gas resources. No country was singled out as a threat (Canada, Russia and the United States were even defined “strategic partners of the EU”), Germany’s interest in the Arctic was mostly devoted to scientific research, fight against climate change and the exploitation of the economic opportunities offered by the Arctic region, and the white paper reflected a post-historical view of the Arctic, as shown by Germany’s disappointment of the inability of the five Arctic coastal states to sign anything similar to the Antarctic Treaty during their 2008 meeting in Ilulissat (Greenland). But, on the 2024 version, the geopolitical tensions with Russia – now defined as “a threat” – and China are the main reason of the Arctic’s growing strategic importance for Germany, while the recent adhesion into NATO of Finland and Sweden is considered as the proof of “the significance of the Arctic for protecting NATO’s northern flank”.
This shift reflects the (perhaps) definitive end of Ostpolitik, the policy of openness towards East Germany and the Eastern Bloc as a whole carried out by Bonn since 1969 and continued by the Unified Germany as a politics of friendly relations to Russia, especially under Gerhard Schröder (1998 – 2005). Much has been said about this Zeitenwende (literally “times turn”), which has been officialised by Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende Speech on 27th February 2022 but whose grounds were actually set by the stance Germany adopted on the Ukrainian Crisis almost ten years before. Someone claimed that this marked Germany’s return into history after the long postwar period, which would ultimately led to a return of German power; others, such as the French political scientist Emmanuel Todd, point the finger to the self-evident contradiction between the establishment of a partnership with Russia in the energy sector and the reliance for the defence needs on a country which has always been a sworn enemy of this partnership. The subsequent events make the second theory more credible: Germany, although with some hesitation, ultimately toed the line set up by Washington and London rather than setting its own like Turkey (a NATO member with an energy partnership with Russia, like Germany, but also a self-reliant power with imperial ambitions), its reaction against the likely saboteurs of the Nord Stream pipelines was very mild, and even its rearmament has been well below the expectations.
In the Arctic, as we are going to see later, one of the main consequences of the Zeitenwende has been the end of the flourishing cooperation between Germany and Russia in the local oil and gas industry, which was actually the main component of the aforementioned German-Russian energy partnership. Equally relevant is the reference to “the end of the Arctic exceptionalism”, namely the idea that pan-Arctic cooperation in areas such as fight against climate change, scientific research and inter-indigenous cooperation could somehow go on in spite of tensions elsewhere. The Arctic is now an area of great power competition, with Berlin taking a clear stance in it, and the white paper states that Germany is stepping up cooperation with what it calls like-minded partners, “also by shifting research projects previously implemented in/with Russia geographically”, while suspending the relations with Russian universities and institutions.
The prominence devoted by the white paper to geopolitical issues, nevertheless, does not imply a loss of interest for climate change and environment protection, especially in a context of green transition and of a very high awareness of the effects of the global warming. Germany is one of the signators of the 2015 Paris Agreements, which force the parties to reach net zero emissions by 2050 in order to limit average temperature growth to 1.5° since pre-industrial levels, and the Paris Agreements are mentioned in the white paper. Sustainable development is therefore mentioned as a priority, with an eye towards the indigenous populations which, according to the guidelines, should be included as equal partners in the research projects and whose knowledge muse be relied on. According to the white paper, there is also a need for new laws and international treaties to protect the environment the Central Arctic Ocean Fishing Agreement, signed in 2018 by China, the Kingdom of Denmark (for the Faroe Islands and Greenland), the EU, Iceland, Japan, Canada, the Republic of Korea, Norway, Russia and the United States. In a contest where the ice cap covering the Central Arctic Ocean is constantly decreasing, and the temptation to fish in the increasingly ice-free Arctic waters can be great, the Agreement introduces a moratorium for fishing in the Central Arctic Ocean for a period of 16 years from its coming into force (2021), namely until 2037. According to the white paper, this sets a positive example for future treaties.
Even in a context of strong geopolitical tensions, such references to climate change is inevitable, since the Arctic is probably the place where global warming is most evident. In 1979, the year when the first official measurement are available, the Arctic ice cap reached a mimimum extent of 6.936 million square kilometres; in 2012, it was of only 3.387 million square kilometres. And, while 2012 signed a record low so far, the overall tendency towards a shrinkage of the ice cap which covers the North Pole and the surrounding waters is self-evident. This, nevertheless, is not void of contradictions. The white paper mentions the importance of the deposits of rare earth elements in the Arctic region, namely for the green transition stated in the Green New Deal; but, as it happens for other points of the green agendas of many Western countries, such as the promotion of electric cars, this may just lead to the emission of CO2 and other pollutant materials being shifted from one place to another – usually from developed to developing countries – rather than being cut.
This white paper doesn’t mention new policies, but is mostly a description of the policies carried out by the German government in the latest years. What is most remarkable on it is that economic interests, which used to be a main driver of Germany’s foreign policy, are now taking a backseat, and geopolitical issues are now taking the lead. The same applies to the scientific research of the Arctic, in spite of the fact that the first Germans arrived in the Arctic not as sailors, businessmen or conquerors, but as scientists. Nevertheless, Germany’s role in Arctic research and its economic interests in the region deserve to be analysed separately, as we are going to do in the next two parts.
Germany’s long-standing involvement in Arctic research helped the country to achieve a prominent role in Arctic-related research, and the same applies for ethnic German scientists living outside Germany, as shown by the importance of the aforementioned Russian-German scientist Wladimir Köppen. This didn’t change much over the year, and scientific research is still one of Germany’s main areas of interest in the Arctic (although no longer the main one). Germany’s Arctic research is currently carried out mostly by two institution: the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) and the Bundesanstalt für Geowissenschaften und Rohstoffe (BGR).
The BGR, based in Hanover, is the first still-operating German institution which engaged in polar studies. Its Arctic involvement started in 1973, thanks to the programme “Geoscientific research in North Atlantic”, and its studies were initially devoted to the Northern oceans and seas, with a focus on the presence of oil and gas deposits. Between 1979 and 1980, thanks to two great Antarctic expeditions, the BGR started to do also land polar research (it subsequently set up also some Antarctic research stations), and in 2001 it made also the first amphibious expedition to the Arctic, namely in the Nares Strait dividing Greenland and the Ellesmere Island in Canada. In 1990, with the German reunification, the scientists and the research sites of the Academy of Sciences of the German Democratic Republic have been incorporated into the BGR.
The main research programme currently carried out by the BGR is the Circum Arctic Structural Events (CASE). Started in 1992, the CASE focused on the study on the geological processes which led to the formation of the Arctic Ocean and, at this end, it conducted studies on several Arctic locations: Canada (Banks Island, Ellesmere Island, the Ellef Ringnes Island and the Yukon North Slope), Greenland (North Greenland), Russia (Polar Urals, Khatanga on the Taymyr Peninsula, the Moma Rift in Yakutia and the New Siberian Islands) and the Svalbard Islands. And, in over thirty years of research activity, the CASE has partnered with 53 universities and research institutions from 11 countries.
Established in Bremerhaven in 1980 and named after the great German geologist and climatologist, the AWI has also been playing a prominent role in Arctic research. Since 1982, the AWI manages the Polarstern research icebreaker, Germany’s only large icebreaker (the rest of the icebreaker fleet is made of smaller ships aimed at clearing German territorial waters from ice, since they occasionally freeze). With an installed power of around 20,000 hp, a maximum speed of 16 knots per hour and an empty weight of 11,904 tons, the Polarstern is deemed to be the most powerful research vessel in the world. Moreover, the icebreaker is able to withstand temperatures up to -50° C, and this allows it to spend around 310 days per year at sea, normally around the Antarctica between November and March and in the Arctic during the Boreal Summer. The Polarstern has been on the North Pole three times, the last one in 2011, and during its voyages it was able to measure a dramatic decrease in the local average ice thickness (around 2 metres in 2001, around 0.9 metres in 2007 and 2011). The Polarstern is expected to be replaced by the new research icebreaker Polarstern 2 in 2027.
In addition to the Polarstern icebreaker, the AWI used to manage two polar research stations: the AWIPEV Station and the Samoylov Island Station. The former, located on the Svalbard Islands, has been established with the Paul Emile Victor Institute (IPEV) in 2003. It is open year-round and it can host up to 120 people in summer and 30 in winter. The latter is located on the mouth of the Lena river in Eastern Siberia, in a region that the AWI defines as “crucial to understanding the processes affecting the permafrost of the Siberian Arctic”, and used to be operated from Spring to Autumn in collaboration with the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute of St. Petersburg and the Melnikov Permafrost Institute of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences of Yakutsk. Since February 2022, nevertheless, the cooperation with Russia on the Samoylov Island Station has been interrupted, together with all forms of cooperation between German and Russian research institutions.
Germany’s economic interests in the Arctic involve first of all oil and gas, and “oil and gas from the Arctic region”, in Germany’s case, has traditionally meant mostly “Russian oil and gas from the Arctic region”. Russia, of course, has not been the only Arctic country which supplies oil and in particular gas to Germany, even before the launch of the Special Military Operation: in 2020, for instance, Wintershall DEA got nine licences for the exploitation of gas fields in Norway, including one in the Barents Sea, four in the Norwegian Sea – the Norwegian basin of the Atlantic Ocean – and four in the North Sea. But Germany’s involvement in the Russian Arctic gas industry has been way greater: Russia has been Germany’s main gas supplier until very recently, and most of the natural gas imported by it comes from the Urengoy and Yamal deposits in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug.
The Soviet Union has been traditionally East Germany’s main oil supplier thanks to the Druzhba pipeline, built in 1964; but it also started playing a role in the West German gas market during the 1980’s, thanks to the construction of the Urengoy – Pomary – Uzhgorod (aka Brotherhood) Pipeline. Its construction, which started in 1981, was financed also by a consortium of German banks, led by Deutsche Bank, which provided 3.4 billion marks to build the compressor stations; and, although the pipeline encountered a strong opposition from the then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan, it was completed in 1984 without much incidents. In the 90’s, the Brotherhood Pipeline was followed by the Yamal – Europa Pipeline, this time connecting the Yamal gas deposits to Western Europe through Belarus and Poland, and in the 2010’s, thanks also to the completion of the Gryazovets – Vyborg gas pipeline (a branch of the aforementioned Yamal – Europa Pipeline), two further conducts have been added, namely the Nord Stream (2011 – 12) and the Nord Stream 2 (2018 – 2021; never entered into service), which connect Russia with Germany through the Baltic Sea.
When we talk about German interests in Russian gas, a name should come into mind: the aforementioned Wintershall DEA (until 2019 Wintershall). A subsidiary of BASF (Badische Anilin-und Sodafabrik), the largest chemical producer in the world, and deemed to be the largest gas company in Europe, Wintershall DEA holds a 15.5 per cent share in the Nord Stream AG, the Swiss-based consortium which used to manage the Nord Stream pipeline, and used to play a role in the Nord Stream 2 as well. But the interests of the company in Russia are not limited to pipelines: Wintershall DEA used indeed to own a 35 per cent share in the Yuzhno-Russkoye Oil and Gas Field a 50 per cent one in the Achimov deposits, both located in the Yamalo – Nenets Autonomous Okrug. The Urengoyskoye Gas Field, where the Achimov deposits are located, contains an estimated 16 trillion cubic meters of gas, while the Yuzhno-Russkoye one holds “only” 1 trillion; and, if we consider that the consortium exploiting the latter extracted 10 billion cubic metres of gas in 2021 only, we could expect that this deposit will still last around 100 years at current level.
In addition to oil and gas, Germany has also a certain interest in the development of the polar navigation routes, especially the NSR (while the Northwest Passage would reduce shipping times to ports such as Vancouver and San Francisco, there are no direct cargo shipping routes to North America’s West Coast at the moment. For Germany’s trade with China and North-Eastern Asia, after all, the NSR is way shorter than the traditional route through the Suez Canal and the Malacca Strait: the Hamburg – Shanghai route, for instance, is just 7,600 nautical miles long through the NSR and 11,400 nautical miles long through the traditional route. Moreover, unlike the latter, the NSR has no constraints in terms of ship size, and it is therefore suitable also for Capesize cargoes. In 2009, two German cargo ships became the first European ones to make a complete voyage through the Northeast Passage; and, according to the spokeswoman of the shipping company owning them, the 10 days saved for the voyage made them save around $200,000. On 18th April 2019, Rosatom and the Port of Hamburg signed a memorandum of understanding for the development of the NSR, and after then its usage sby German shipping companies increased dramatically: in 2021, for instance, the United Heavy Lift company from Hamburg alone carried out 18 voyages across the Northeast Passage.
At the moment, nevertheless, the partnerships in both oil and gas and the shipping sector have been put on hold. On 22nd February 2022, the certification of the Nord Stream 2 has been suspended by the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The Nord Stream pipelines has been sabotaged in September 2022, with the self-evident aim of hinder any possible German-Russian reapproachment in the future, and the packages of sanctions adopted by the EU banned the import of most oil and gas items from Russia – with the exception of pipeline gas – and the supply of technology for its extraction. In the meanwhile, Wintershall disinvested from its Arctic gas fields in January 2023 and its assets have been transferred to the Russian government in the December of the same year as per presidential decree. At the same time, Germany has pledged to replace Russia as its main gas supplier, and Norway – incidentally one of the authors the Nord Stream sabotage, at least according to the prominent American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh – replaced Russia as Germany’s main gas supplier in 2022. Something similar applied for the NSR: since 2022, German shipping companies shifted back to the Suez Canal and other traditional ways for their voyages to the Far East, and while nothing forbids non-Western companies to ship between Germany and the Far East through the NSR, for the same reason non-Western airlines continue to use the Russian air space to fly between Western airports and Asian or Middle Eastern destinations, at the moment the NSR is mostly used for the trade between Russia and China, although there is a growing interest in it by neutral and Russia-leaning countries such as Kazakhstan.
Will Germany start back buying Russian gas, investing in Russian oil and gas fields and shipping through the NSR? The Zeitenwende is not really sustainable in the long term: Russian pipeline gas is way more convenient than its alternatives, the reduction in Russian gas supplies has already caused an economic downturn, and it is not surprising if some Russian gas continues to flow into Germany as LNG, mostly through the Netherlands and Belgium. But a restoration of the pre-2022 situation requires a political will on the German side which is currently lacking, and while the upcoming German federal elections will likely see a growth of the parties which support a normalisation of the relations with Russia, they are unlikely to be included into any government coalition, let alone to have the numbers (and the political will) to form a coalition, and therefore it’s unlikely that any German attempt to normalise its relations with Russia will preceed any kind of settlement – between the Kremlin and the White House, rather than anyone else – of the main issue currently dividing Russia and the Collective West. A restoration of German-Russian relationships in the scientific research sphere independently on the Ukrainian issue is just slightly more likely: the limited restart of the work of the Arctic Council shows that the Arctic is still somehow exceptional, but at the same time it shows the limits of Arctic exceptionalism.
Giuseppe Cappelluti
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