Who saved Antarctica? Libro del australiano Andrew Jackson, 2021.
Almost always exposed to
English through technical literature, we non-native speakers especially enjoy
the good writing in a book in this, a second language for many. Andrew
Jackson´s Who Saved Antarctica is then an enjoyable read as well as a
comprehensive and honest chronology and analysis of the change underwent by
Antarctic politics in the late `80s. A similar account of those same events in
Spanish doesn´t exist, and this should be a matter of concern for us latins of
the southern hemisphere with a long history in Antarctica: if such an
understanding of Antarctic policy is lacking for our public, what are we
really understanding?
Despite having been part
of the events he describes, the book transmits a remarkable honesty. This
doesn´t mean the author isn’t seeking to defend his country´s policy, which he
passionately does with characteristic anglosaxon absence of emotionality.
Rather, the reader is at all times provided with information about the context
and of events of the kind not consigned in official records. The emphasis
placed in stating the source of ideas, positions or comments made at the time
by means of a million footnotes is one of the book`s most important
contributions. This feature, a requirement of the academic environment in which
the research was developed, provides for the novelty of a book on Antarctic
policy which justifies or at least provides support for the characterizations
presented. That is, Jackson reveals the grounds on which he describes a
political process the way he does. Thus, the sistematicity of an academic paper
is brought to a book on policy. A rather unusual, and difficult, quality in a
book on policy. And make no mistake: the book isn’t, thanks be to God, a
collection of previously published, loosely connected, time de-phased academic
papers.
The book therefore is
successful in delivering two things: first, it provides a clear chronology and
reflections of an Australian foreign relations expert on a crucial time for
Antarctic policy, uncontaminated with political correctness. Only that makes
the book recommendable. But, secondly, it places in the public eye a very
important amount of information about the people and turnarounds that mediated a
long diplomatic process. Being secrecy an accusation that has always surrounded
antarctic policy, this gives the book a feeling of rebelliousness. If Antarctic
policy can be explained publicly, as Jackson shows, can we keep spending
sizeable amounts of tax payer´s money in Antarctica in secrecy?
It can be argued that
Jackson´s book is aimed at presenting a sudden, very sudden, change in
Australia´s position towards the 1988 mining convention for Antarctica
(“CRAMRA”). The reader will much more quickly understand the book if read in
the light of Francis Auburn´s analysis of the USSR´s and the US´ policy of
“access to all antarctica”, described in his 1982 classic Antarctic law
and politics. Although the numerous circumstances described in the first
chapter are integrated into an analysis of long-term policy consequences in the
last chapters, a more explicit link between the sudden rejection of a mining
framework and Australia´s position as a claimant State could have been
developed. One might even say it should have been developed . Honest as the book is, Jackson seems to deliberately circumnavigate the issue but omits facing it, not
only in one of the first chapters, but also when reflecting on the policy
consequences towards the last pages. But this could have deserved a chapter of
its own. It is the intangibility of territorial claims which the 1988 rejection
of CRAMRA had as a main consequence. Who saved Antarctica tells
how Auburn´s criteria were put into practice, impeding the implementation of
the “access to all Antarctica” policy beyond scientific purposes. Jackson´s
analysis of the long-lasting validity of territoriality would have made the
book more direct. A contribution to explain, again, why Antarctica is no
exception, and is, like the rest of the surface of the earth, subject to
history and to the mechanisms that have allocated territories to the different
societies. Not only the very circumstances brought by the book strongly point
to this. The recent events leading to the establishment of oceanic boundaries
in the Arctic would have provided the author with an adequate background from outside
Antarctic-specific institutions and events.
This book does deserve
to be read, a first time from beginning to end, and a second backwards,
reviewing the careful diplomatic chronology of the first chapters through the
lens of the second part, where a farther-reaching criteria is provided in the thorough analysis of the consequences of the 1988-1989 changes for the life of the Antarctic Treaty System.
Andrew Jackson saved
Antarctic policy from overemphasized, overacted secrecy, by means of providing a platform to
understand the specific position of Antarctic States in the international polar
scene.