Description
This paper situates the diplomatic activities leading up to the 1958-9 Washington Conference and the negotiation of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) in larger cultural imaginaries of ice, scientific exploration, and planetary threat. In particular, this paper focuses on the metaphor of ‘freezing’ as a diplomatically desirable outcome for competing territorial claims in Antarctica (Scott 2011; Mancilla 2018; Yao 2021), but also explores the accompanying metaphor of ‘thawing’ and its threat to humanity and collective politics. To do so, the paper puts formal diplomatic correspondence in conversation with popular explorers’ accounts of their voyages to Antarctica and dystopic science fiction (including Lovecraft’s 1936 At the Mountains of Madness and Campbell’s 1938 Who Goes There) of what lurks beneath the Antarctic ice. To illustrate the continuing relevance of both metaphors on Antarctic diplomacy, the paper ends with a consideration of the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCMALR) established in 1982 as part of the ATS. Here, I argue that the fear of thawing continues to inform and threaten the success of diplomatic efforts in Antarctica.
