The Arctic has increasingly become the subject of strategic debates, prompting
numerous actors – including the European Union (EU) – to develop Arctic strategies.
Importantly, these strategies need to address the ‘Arctic paradox’, that is, the trade-off between pursuing the economic opportunities arising from an increasingly ice-free
Arctic and preventing environmental degradation in a region of central importance
for the global climate. This paper investigates how the EU has positioned itself in this
respect by asking to what extent its emerging Arctic policy has integrated
environmental concerns. To do so, it initially conducts a discourse analysis of Arctic
strategies of the EU institutions, Arctic and major non-Arctic EU member states. It finds
that these three groups each form a ‘discourse coalition’ advocating for strong, weak
and moderate environmental policy integration (EPI) in the EU’s Arctic policy
respectively. A probe into the Arctic policy practice of typical representatives of these
coalitions shows that a multi-level pattern exists which combines an EU-level pro-EPI
discourse and action and varying member state-level commitments to EPI. The paper
concludes by arguing that the Arctic policy at the EU level is currently ‘green by
omission’− avoiding contentious subjects in the discourse as well as in actions − and
discusses the implications of this finding
