Svalbard and the surrounding seas - new foreign policy challenges for Norway?

Developments over the last decade have created new challenges for Norwegian Svalbard policy. The radical downsizing of coal mining has been rapid and the Norwegian community has become increasingly dominated by tourism, with a large share of the staff being non-Norwegian, making it harder to treat the administrative centre Longyearbyen as a regular Norwegian municipality. Russia continues to be the only other country with a sizeable, concentrated presence. Its fundamental interests on Svalbard are stable: making sure that the islands cannot be used to the detriment of Russian security. Frictions with Norwegian authorities are related to Russia’s plans to diversify away from increasingly loss-making coal mining into tourism and research support, where Norwegian environmental legislation and restrictions on helicopters are obstacles. The positions of various states on the status of the maritime zones and the continental shelf around Svalbard have been known for some time, but the appearance of the snow crab - a sedentary species - on the continental shelf provoked a legal dispute where the EU reluctantly became involved.