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.