Giuk Gap Concept: Essential and Discursive Interpretation

The article analyzes the space between Greenland, Iceland and the UK (GIUK) as a single region, and considers the role of the GIUK Gap in the securitization of the Soviet Union and Russia by analytical communities of NATO members. The study stresses that this concept has become very popular among Western analysts, while Russian international relations specialists still do not use this term, which lacks proper conceptualization from Russia’s perspective. The article uses unpublished archival sources to watch the formation of the GIUK region against the backdrop of globalization and the growing great powers’ and superpowers’ involvement into the North Atlantic security dynamics. It concludes that the formation of the GIUK regional space and the rhetorical use thereof by Western politicians since the mid‑20th century has been linked to constructing external threats. After the beginning of the Cold War, the source of the declared threat to the security of the USA and its NATO allies in the GIUK was the Soviet Union. Thus, even the scientific and economic involvement of Moscow into the regional processes has been consistently perceived as dangerous. The construction of the Soviet and Russian threats and, as a consequence, the strengthening of regional cohesion has been facilitated not only by public speeches of Western politicians, but also by media and mass culture, where the idea of the GUIK’s vulnerability to the Soviet and Russian armed forces has been constantly replicated. As the relations between Russian and the West deteriorated in 2014, the GIUK concept was reinvigorated. The final part of the article considers the issue of translating the semantic and discursive meaning of the term GIUK Gap into Russian. It posits that some parallels between the GIUK Gap and the Suwalki Gap could help to grasp the discursive meaning of the former concept in the Western security lexicon.