Like many great institutions, the Antarctic Treaty system has its own creation myth, according to which it was brought into being by the Antarctic science programme of the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year (IGY). As myths are prone to do, this one combines both an important truth and a good deal of misinformation. After fifty years in which it has shamelessly flattered the earth scientists, who are understandably rather fond of it, and undervalued the many non-scientists who advocated the internationalisation of Antarctica from 1910 onwards, it is time to lay it to rest. But before summarising the intermeshing contributions of private citizens, diplomats and other officials, and scientists, we should first take note of a different factor altogether, political geography.

During the last century acceptable candidates for the status of global commons tended to be of the inaccessible and/or unprofitable variety, but that did not always secure their international recognition. Thus we have an Outer Space Treaty (1967), but the Moon Treaty (1979) has been ratified by only a handful of countries, including Australia, Mexico and Pakistan, and is therefore generally regarded as having failed. The geosynchronous satellite orbit has been partly established as a global common, thanks to what is perhaps the single most significant achievement in this area of international law, the work of the International Telecommunications Union, which will be 150 years old in 2015. The putative extent of the high seas, or international waters, was considerably reduced as a global common by the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea, due mainly to technological advances such as the development of offshore oil and gas fields. Some progress has been made with collectivising the atmosphere through the Kyoto Protocol and other emissions trading schemes. Attempts to confer the status of global or regional commons on assets long included in or divided between national territories, such as major rivers or rain forests, have made little progress. Collectivisation of the Arctic faces similar obstacles, as recent events involving the five Arctic coastal states have demonstrated.

In that context we can appreciate both the significance of political geography for the restricted internationalisation of Antarctica, and the problems that may arise in the future from any climatic or technological change in its condition as ‘a pole apart’, to borrow a familiar phrase. If Antarctica had not been largely separated from other land masses by the vastness of the Southern Ocean, then its inhospitability and distance from the centres of naval power in the northern hemisphere might not have sufficed to protect it from irreversible territorial acquisition. Even as it was things nearly went that way, and could yet do so. And if global, technological civilisation had originated in South America or Polynesia, then Antarctica's geographical isolation and lack of readily exploitable land based resources would probably not have saved it either. Its unique combination of geographical remoteness and political marginality owed little to any conscious human agency.

Turning now to human actors, none of the scientists who made up the first International Polar Commission, from 1879 to 1891, or who tried to establish a second one between 1906 and 1914, advocated the political internationalisation of Antarctica. The first person to do so was Thomas Willing Balch (1866–1927), an American expert in international law, in 1910. Within two years The New York Times supported him. After the League of Nations was established in 1920 the first person to suggest, in February 1929, that it should take control of Antarctica was the American long range weather forecaster Herbert Browne (1862–1936). The first non-governmental organisation to adopt this view, transferred to the United Nations (UN), was the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which did so in the 1940s.

Between 1910 and 1946 most support for internationalisation came from Americans, plus a few people in Britain, France, and the Scandinavian countries. They, or at least their spokespersons, tended to be lawyers, Christians, socialists, or some combination of the three. At the end of 1946 leading American newspapers began to endorse (or re-endorse) the idea. In March 1947 a Washington Post opinion poll found that 66% of respondents were in favour of placing Antarctica under UN control. Press leaks from the United States Department of State cannot be ruled out. But publicly at least, no appointed or elected officials had shaped that climate of opinion.

In 1946 officials at the State Department were confronted with an Antarctic political problem made up of four distinct elements, only one of which was scientific. The first was a resumption of the territorial conflict between Argentina, Britain and Chile in respect of the Antarctic Peninsula, which had been taken to a new level when Britain installed the first permanent bases in 1944. The second was a proposal from the Geological Society of South Africa for a third polar year. The British Commonwealth's polar committee moved promptly to reject it, partly on the grounds that the Soviet Union could not be prevented from taking part. But they failed to suppress the story completely; a garbled version appeared in The New York Times in July 1946. Thirdly, there was the acquisition of a German whaling flotilla by the Soviet Union under the terms of the 1945 Potsdam Agreement. The British government had rather cavalierly appropriated it for a year, but finally transferred it to Soviet officials in September 1946. Lastly, in the summer of 1946 the United States Navy decided, without much, if any, consultation with the State Department, to send a large expedition to Antarctica at the end of the year called Operation Highjump. This was of some concern to the Department, because it was bound to be viewed with suspicion by American allies in Europe and the southern hemisphere.

The response of State Department officials to all this was to initiate a comprehensive review of United States Antarctic policy, starting in November 1946. A memorandum from WILPF was among the materials that they considered. A year later they began exploratory discussions with British officials about various options for internationalisation, which were then widened to include the other six governments with territorial claims in Antarctica and finalised as a firm diplomatic proposal in 1948. The American initiative launched a long and difficult negotiating process which eventually resulted in the signing of the Antarctic Treaty in December 1959. Some credit is owed to scientific internationalism as one of several factors to which the State Department was responding. But in 1946 the scientific internationalism in question was a proposal sent by South African geologists to the Royal Society's empire scientific conference, not the much later IGY.

There were two major changes in American policy between 1948 and the opening of preliminary twelve-power talks at Washington DC in June 1958. The first was an informal but increasingly real acceptance of a Chilean counter-proposal that, instead of replacing their territorial claims with some form of pooled sovereignty, nations with Antarctic interests should just agree on a programme of scientific cooperation and effectively suspend their claims for the duration. This ‘status quo’ strand within American policy was actively pursued for several years, but ran into difficulties in the early 1950s when conflict flared again in the Antarctic Peninsula. Meanwhile, the realisation by State Department officials that scientific cooperation in Antarctica could serve a useful political purpose was probably one of several factors which gave rise to the second, successful proposal for a third polar year, the IGY, put forward in 1950.

As originally conceived there was nothing universal about the State Department's would-be settlement; one of its main aims was to exclude the Soviet Union. That ruled out any direct connection with the UN, an option that was considered for a short time. But another major policy shift came in the late 1950s, when the British, concerned about the support for universal internationalisation under the UN that had been coming quietly from New Zealand and more recently and less quietly from India, settled for the lesser evil of inviting the Soviet Union, shorn of allies or supporters, into a cartel to be created outside the UN. The Foreign Office then persuaded a reluctant State Department to adopt this approach and to help persuade others, such as the Australian government of Robert Menzies, to go along with it.

The IGY did not inspire or initiate the diplomatic process that eventually resulted in the Treaty. It may, in part at least, have been a response to that process rather than the other way around. But it did make two vital contributions to the eventual success of the negotiations, which corresponded to the two policy changes described above. Firstly, before either the Foreign Office or the State Department had come around to the idea of including the Soviet Union in a settlement, the IGY provided the Soviet Academy of Sciences with the perfect opportunity to organise an Antarctic research programme. Western leaders of the IGY were privately divided over doing this, between 1954 and 1955, but it was an unavoidable consequence of their having originally invited the Soviet Academy to join the IGY, back in November 1952, coupled with the major emphasis placed on Antarctica within the programme as a whole. Soviet delegates to IGY Antarctic conferences conducted themselves in a positive spirit of international scientific cooperation, between 1955 and 1957, perhaps because their main political objective had already been achieved, that is inclusion.

The IGY's second invaluable contribution consisted in demonstrating that the Chilean idea of suspending claims and focusing on scientific cooperation could actually work, at least for a limited period, despite the persistence of international rivalries within the programme. By chance the IGY entered its Antarctic planning phase soon after direct diplomatic exchanges about the Chilean proposal had become bogged down. Nevertheless the diplomatic impasse with the status quo option meant that the alternative of outright political internationalisation, first advocated by the early lobbyists and then adopted, and adapted, by the State Department in 1948, became the front runner again for a few years. The dialectic between status quo and condominium came to a dramatic head between September 1957 and March 1958. On 8 March 1958 a National Security Council policy paper spelled out both alternatives, but no longer as equally viable choices. The obstacles facing the condominium option had finally been assessed as far harder to overcome than the probable difficulties of a limited cooperation with the Soviet Union on the basis of the status quo. Thus on 24 March the State Department initiated the final, arduous phase of negotiations by circulating to the eleven other governments whose IGY committees were running Antarctic or sub-Antarctic stations, including the seven claimant nations and the Soviet Union, an aide mémoire which was framed entirely in terms of the status quo approach, as would be the eventual treaty.

The aide mémoire also prefigured the treaty by highlighting the goal of continued scientific cooperation along IGY lines. It was appropriate to acknowledge the political assistance which had come from the IGY. Would there have been an Antarctic Treaty without the IGY? Perhaps not, or not at least in 1959. But then would there have been an IGY, at least 25% of which worldwide was paid for by the United States, without a galvanising spark from American Antarctic policy? Perhaps not also, or not in 1957.

Much has changed in the Antarctic Treaty regime since the 1960s, thanks to further international agreements and to a transformation in the arrangements under which scientists take part in Antarctic governance. The question of whether that evolution has preserved or supplanted the status quo, the nexus of international rivalries, claims, resource postulations and other aspirations that prevailed in the early 1950s, is a matter for continuing debate. A more nuanced understanding of the origins of the treaty is perhaps more relevant to the wider question of how such international regimes are established. The myth about the IGY having originated the treaty can be refuted from the simple fact that the proliferation of international programmes in the earth sciences, since World War II, has not resulted in the parallel collectivisation and pacification of large parts of the planet. The uncomfortable lesson from the narrative summarised here is that the processes which actually led to the Antarctic Treaty were complex, lengthy, partisan, flukey, vulnerable, and never wholly under the control of those who tried to shape them. However stout-hearted, let would-be emulators and imitators beware.