Arctic Legal Tides: The Politics of International Law in the Northwest Passage by Justin DeMowbray Nankivell LLM, University of Nottingham, UK, 2002 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (Political Science) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) July, 2010 Justin DeMowbray Nankivell, 2010 Abstract The politics of international law should be seen as a constant condition of international affairs within which the practices of international law and world politics unfold. This work aims to uncover several ways to understand the politics of international law, and in particular, to understand how law and politics interact within extended foreign policy sequences. These long foreign policy episodes are generally centered on a particular component, or body of, international law. Yet they are also subject to numerous elements and functions of international law which give form and content to a state’s policy development. These include complex compliance decisions, repeated public justifications over the terms of legal validity, learning what the law requires to meet thresholds of compliance, and states’ engaging in forms of legal rhetoric known as creative legal arguments: legal justifications that attempt to change international law when states face difficult policy choices. These various areas of international law highlight, in part, how international law ‘works’, or has effects within world politics. This project attempts to consolidate recent scholarship in this subject area by employing eclectic theorizing to explain the politics of international law as it unfolds in policy deliberation and choice. This task involves utilizing many insights from social constructivism and critical international legal theory, but also capturing the central ideas of legal realism, rationalism, and interactionalism in their ability to explain compliance decisions. From this point of departure, this work attempts to build theoretical bridges through a genuine interdisciplinary engagement with international relations and international law. Such an endeavor brings clarity to empirical events and historical legal phenomena. To demonstrate this claim, the analysis offered evaluates the foreign policy sequence in Canadian legal policy over the Arctic waters known as the Northwest Passage, a forty year legal dispute between Canada and the United States. The case study sheds light on how international law-making unfolds over time, by virtue of the numerous iterations between Canada and the United States in bi-lateral settings, international conferences, and the third codification conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). ii Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents ................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ vi Dedication ............................................................................................................................. viii Chapter One: Introduction .................................................................................................... 1 Outline of the Thesis ........................................................................................................... 19 Chapter Two: Uncovering the Politics of International Law ........................................... 23 The Primary Functions of International Law in World Politics .......................................... 29 International law as constraint and enablement ............................................................... 29 Constitutive rules ............................................................................................................. 32 Law as standards ............................................................................................................. 34 Legal Theory as Constraint and Enablement ...................................................................... 36 International Law as Communicative and Learning Device ............................................... 43 International Law as Strategic Policy .................................................................................. 46 The ontology of creative legal arguments ....................................................................... 46 Legality and legitimacy ................................................................................................... 49 Overlapping regimes and legal fragmentation ................................................................ 55 Interstitial norms .............................................................................................................. 58 Progressive jurisprudence ................................................................................................ 59 The Historical Conditions enabling Creative Legal Arguments ......................................... 62 Situating the Primary Functions of International Law in Theory ....................................... 65 Avoiding Preferential Theory Choice through Analytical Eclecticism............................... 67 Analytical eclecticism for international law .................................................................... 69 Aggregating Theory for the Interdisciplinary Project ......................................................... 71 Realism ............................................................................................................................ 72 Rationalism ...................................................................................................................... 75 Interactionalism ............................................................................................................... 78 Choice of Case Study .......................................................................................................... 83 Method ................................................................................................................................ 84 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 89 Chapter Three: The Contextual Structures and Fundamental Institutions of 1968 ...... 91 The State of Public International Law ................................................................................. 94 The LOS Regime ............................................................................................................... 109 The Regime of Oil Pollution and the Discourse on Ecology ............................................ 126 The Context of US-Canadian Relations: Foreign Policy and the Law of the Sea............. 131 Canada’s Arctic Law Assumptions ................................................................................... 139 Defining a Holistic Context ............................................................................................... 150 Chapter Four: The Construction of Canada’s Arctic Policy (1969-1970) ..................... 152 January, 1969: The Distant Thoughts of Arctic Sovereignty ........................................... 154 Legal Appraisal: The March Cabinet Memorandum ........................................................ 160 iii Spring, 1969: Navigating Domestic Politics ..................................................................... 166 September, 1969: Cabinet Deliberations with External Affairs ........................................ 173 October-December, 1969 .................................................................................................. 182 Winter, 1970: Penultimate Cabinet Deliberations ............................................................. 189 The Arctic Waters Policy (April 1970): Canada’s Creative Legal Argument .................. 201 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 208 Chapter Five: Theoretical Evaluation and Counterfactuals .......................................... 210 The Ontology of the 1970 Arctic Legislation: Canada’s Creative Legal Argument ........ 210 How was the 1970 Arctic Policy Possible? ....................................................................... 222 How did International Law Matter to the 1970 Arctic Case? ........................................... 235 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 242 Chapter Six: Canada’s Process of Persuasion through Legal Diplomacy: The International Legal College Weighs In (1970-1972) ........................................................ 244 Spring, 1970: the Canadian Legal Academy goes to Broadway ....................................... 248 Learning Legal Contours ................................................................................................... 259 Diplomatic Globetrotting .................................................................................................. 263 Canada’s Legal College Consolidates ............................................................................... 266 Pharand and Henkin .........................................................................................................