The European Commission has a long-standing application to join the council as a ‘permanent observer’, and Finland lobbied hard for the application at the ministerial meeting in Nuuk, Greenland on May 12th. Canada and Russia have traditionally been opposed to the EU membership, and even EU-member Sweden insisted on the pre-eminence of the Arctic Council’s eight member states; Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and the US.

Recommendations on whether the standing candidates are eligible will probably come out of next year’s deputy foreign ministers meeting, but Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt stated that “at the end of the day, members are members, and observers are observers”.

The council rejected the EU’s application to join as a ‘permanent observer’ in 2009; a decision that surprised EU officials since three Arctic Council members also are part of the EU. French delegate to the European Parliament, Michel Rocard went as far as to question the Arctic Council states’ capacity to tackle the growing list of issues in the area over the next 20 or 30 years.

In the end it will be up to the ministers of the Arctic Council to decide who will be awarded the ‘permanent observer’ status, and Canada and Russia still question the motives of some applicants as the region is rapidly becoming a political and economical hot-spot. The complaints voiced in Brussels over the EU’s obvious role as an actor in the region is therefore somewhat contradictory to the arguments made by some Arctic states, saying that the EU as a an organisation has no real mandate nor legitimacy in the Arctic. Allowing the EU a permanent observer status also opens up for a whole range of other state and non-state actors to apply, bringing up the issue of whether the Arctic is a region to be handled mainly by the surrounding states  or a by the broader world community at large.