Surrounded by potted palm trees, the 12 delegations including the Soviet Union invited to participate by the United States government decided, over the course of six intense weeks, the legal, political and scientific future of the Antarctic continent and surrounding seas. Thanks in part to the neatly typed entries of Brian Roberts, the Foreign Office's polar advisor for many years; we have at least one source that vividly conveys (from the perspective of a British delegate of course) the febrile atmosphere surrounding the conference (see King and Savours Reference King and Savours1995; Dodds Reference Dodds2008). Notwithstanding the achievements of the recently completed 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year and its extension the International Geophysical Co-operation (1959), there was no reason to presume that an Antarctic Treaty would be recognised as legitimate and sufficiently robust to accommodate all the parties concerned. Indeed, it is not uncommon to read in the reports prepared by the delegates for their domestic political leaders, a whole series of counter-factual possibilities if the negotiations failed to secure a modus vivendi for the polar region. We may not assume, therefore, that it was in any way inevitable that a treaty (lasting now for over fifty years) would have emerged when the delegates sat down to discuss the future of Antarctica in October 1959. The treaty was nearly not ratified in Argentina for example because of the anger felt by some political leaders about Article IV and what they considered the ‘giving away’ of Argentine sovereign rights.

In their different ways, the invited commentaries set out below touch upon some of the reasons why the Antarctic Treaty has proved so enduring yet at the same time has left some issues that remain to be negotiated and managed. The testy issue of the ownership of the Antarctic continent and the surrounding seas is probably the most problematic and recent submissions to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, under the rubric of the United Nations Law of the Sea, amply illustrate that territorial and resource questions pertaining to the region retain piquancy. While the delegates to the Antarctic Treaty did not consider contemporary issues such as tourism, bioprospecting and intensive living resource exploitation, they were sufficiently far sighted to produce a treaty that was, as far as possible, future proofed.

These reflections are timely and will contribute to the ongoing debates about the efficacy of those 1959 negotiations and its aftermath, a topic that will be considered further in December 2009 at a so-called Antarctic Treaty summit (see http://www.atsummit50.aq/), designed to consider the ‘lessons’ offered by the experience of the treaty itself. Such debate and dialogue is of course welcome but allow me to end on a slightly provocative note. Our understanding of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty negotiations is still partial. We await, for example, the pioneering work of Irina Gan and her archival investigations of Soviet attitudes and negotiating strategies towards the Antarctic in the 1950s (See Gan Reference Gan2009). There is still a great deal more to contribute beyond the well–established, dare one note, hegemonic Anglophone polar studies. A new generation of scholars such as Christy Collis, Adrian Howkins and Peder Roberts are deploying feminist, post-colonial and critical history of science perspectives to good effect respectively (see, for example, Collis Reference Collis2009; Howkins Reference Howkins2008; Roberts Reference Roberts2004). This will unsettle some of our entrenched understandings of the Antarctic Treaty and its negotiating contexts. Finally, if we are interested in deriving ‘lessons’ from the Antarctic Treaty negotiations then maybe they are both profound and at the same time banal, the men (and women who often disappear from most male-stream (if you forgive the pun) accounts) responsible for the treaty were far sighted, lucky, and ultimately showed sufficient self-restraint to secure a consensus of sorts. The absence of an indigenous human population and the pressures of 24/7 news reporting probably helped matters as well. We need to hang onto the contingency and precariousness of events and circumstances.