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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Long regarded as an empty and inhospitable environment, the deep ocean is rapidly emerging as an ecological hot spot with a remarkable diversity of biological life. Yet, the world s oceans are currently on a dangerous trajectory of decline, threatened by acidification, oil and gas drilling, overfishing, and, in the long term, deep-sea mining, bioprospecting, and geo-engineering. In The Geopolitics of Deep Oceans, noted environmental sociologist John Hannigan examines the past, present and future of our planet s final frontier . The author argues that our understanding of the deep - its definition, boundaries, value, ownership, health and future state - depends on whether we see it first and foremost as a resource cornucopia, a political chessboard, a shared commons, or a unique and threatened ecology. He concludes by locating a new storyline that imagines the oceans as a canary-in-the-mineshaft for gauging the impact of global climate change. The Geopolitics of Deep Oceans is a unique introduction to the geography, law, politics and sociology of the sub-surface ocean. It will appeal to anyone seriously concerned about the present state and future fate of the largest single habitat for life on our planet.
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Seitenzahl: 316
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Dedication
To Ruth
Copyright page
Copyright © John Hannigan 2016
The right of John Hannigan to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8018-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8019-4 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hannigan, John A., 1948-
The geopolitics of deep oceans / John Hannigan.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-8018-7 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-7456-8019-4 (pbk.) 1. Ocean. 2. Abyssal zone. 3. Geopolitics. I. Title.
JZ3690.H36 2015
341.4′5–dc23
2015011653
Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon
by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
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Acknowledgements
In February 2015, a week ago as I write these lines, Eugenie Clark, the ‘Shark Lady’, died aged 92 at her home in Sarasota, Florida. In a lifetime filled with discovery, adventure and professional achievement, Eugenie made over 70 deep dives in submersibles, appeared in 50 television specials and documentaries, developed a shark repellent and discovered three species of fish new to science. One of the great pleasures of writing a book on deep oceans has been to come across a cast of larger than life characters like Eugenie Clark who collectively have contributed so much to our understanding of and fascination with the deep. Consider Arthur C. Clarke, the celebrated science fiction author, who was also a devoted diver and a tireless proselytizer for colonizing the underwater ‘frontier’ in the 1950s. And then there was the aristocratic Elisabeth Mann Borgese, daughter of the esteemed novelist Thomas Mann and member of the legendary Club of Rome, who probably did more than anyone to encourage the scholarly study of the Law of the Sea. And, of course, one should not forget Jacques Cousteau, inventor of the aqualung, captain of the research ship Calypso, underwater treasure hunter and pioneering marine ecological activist.
When I first floated the idea of writing about the geopolitics of deep oceans to Louise Knight, Senior Acquisitions Editor at Polity, it must have seemed somewhat of a leap of faith. While I had written books about environmental sociology and on the international politics of natural disasters, I had not published anything pertaining to oceans, except for a pair of journal articles on El Niños and meteorological science, and a piece decades ago on flag of convenience ships and maritime labour. To her everlasting credit, Louise believed in this project and sagely pointed me towards the excellent and related work being done by Klaus Dodds of Royal Holloway, University of London, and his colleagues on Polar Regions and critical geopolitics. Also at Polity, Louise's assistant Pascal Porcheron inherited the project from David Winters and has done a wonderful job shepherding it through the various stages of editorial review and production. Justin Dyer was a rigorous and perceptive copy-editor. At a point where I was just beginning to see how everything fitted together, Phil Burgess, Director of Policy and Research at the Global Ocean Commission, generously met with me at Somerville College, Oxford, to discuss the book project. It was reassuring to realize for the first time that I was headed in the right direction. I am indebted to one of the appraisers of this project (identified only as Reader #1), who went far beyond the call of duty in text-editing the manuscript as well as offering some really useful and collegial suggestions about books and articles I might want to read.
Finally, I could not have done this without the support of my family. When I was thinking about a new environmental writing project to follow Disasters without Borders (Hannigan, 2012), my wife Ruth and I talked at length about various possibilities – at one point volcanoes were a candidate – before I embraced her suggestion that I might want to consider oceans. Coming across the timely and suspenseful British television series The Deep sealed the deal. Ruth's love, interest and enthusiasm throughout this project have been vital to its success. Tim, our younger son, who starts his own professorial career at the University of Alberta in October 2015, assumed the critical task of merging the chapters into a single document. In addition, he offered up some insightful comments, as did TJ, his older brother, who is nearing completion of his doctorate at Temple University. The rest of the family, our two girls Maeve and Olivia and our 3½ year-old grandson Andrew, each provided support in their own way. Thank you one and all.
Abbreviations and Acronyms
Text Boxes
1.1 Solwara 1
1.2 Flammable Ice
3.1 Raising the Red Star
3.2 Cheap Stealth
Note on Measurements
Whilst it is not fixed in stone, the usual rule of thumb in maritime measurement is to use (imperial) miles for horizontal distances across the water surface and (metric) metres and kilometres for vertical depths. Accordingly, I will follow this convention throughout the book. Some further confusion arises over the issue of miles versus nautical miles (a nautical mile is 1.1508 miles). Sources are often vague on this issue and do not specify nautical miles where this might in fact be the case. Alas, there is no clean and simple solution here. All I can do is to specify nautical miles where these are identified as such.
Epigraph
We are more familiar with the myths and fantasies that cling to the ocean than its natural conditions, reflecting our relative ignorance of its spaces and species.
(Alex Farquharson, Director of the Nottingham (UK) Contemporary Art Gallery [see Farquharson, 2013: 6])
Introduction
Like many of us, my knowledge of the deep ocean1 came initially from the theatre of the imagination. As a child, I was enthralled by the battles against colossal squid, and other underwater creatures, waged by the mysterious Captain Nemo in Jules Verne's literary classic Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, I became a devoted viewer of the popular American syndicated television series Sea Hunt, whose 155 episodes featured veteran Hollywood actor Lloyd Bridges as scuba diver Mike Nelson. Each week, Nelson performed underwater rescues, thwarted crime and located everything from a sunken freighter to submarines and satellites. In one memorable and prophetic episode, ‘The Manganese Story’ (aired on 4 October 1958), ‘Mike discovers a manganese deposit, but an ambitious young geologist, sharks, and an approaching hurricane threaten to silence him before he can inform the government.’2 As I will discuss in the next chapter, the search for minerals under the sea did not, in fact, get underway until a decade later, in the late 1960s; even then, manganese mining has only become commercially viable within the last decade.
As a teenager, I affixed a poster of ‘the Creature from the Black Lagoon' to my bedroom wall. The creature was presented in the 1954 3-D film of the same name as a lost link between land and sea animals from the Devonian period. The ‘Gill-Man’, as he was also known, has since become iconic in North American popular culture, even once popping up in an episode of The Simpsons, where he emerged from Lake Springfield. More reassuringly, the Beatles sang about a romantic escape to a paradise beneath the sea where one could chill in an ‘Octopus's garden in the shade’. Later on, these fictional accounts were supplemented by ‘real’ snippets of knowledge about the deep gleaned from National Geographic, aquarium visits and television documentaries on PBS and the Discovery Channel. These featured oddly shaped marine creatures that looked like nothing ever seen before, brightly hued corals under threat from human incursion, and deep-sea divers in steel cages being battered by bloodthirsty sharks.
Today, the ocean is on the verge of being transformed from a ‘half-known life’ of ‘submarine aliens’ (Hoare, 2013: 14–15) to an emerging focus of global attention and concern. In 2008, the United Nations General Assembly decided that, starting in 2009, 8 June would henceforth be designated by the United Nations as ‘World Oceans Day’. For World Oceans Day, 2012, the Empire State Building in New York City was lit up in the evening in white, blue and purple, representing the different levels of the ocean. While ‘Brangelina’ (the celebrity Hollywood couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) still appear focused on human rights activism, fellow ‘A-list’ celebrity Leonardo DiCaprio has discovered the plight of the oceans, as well as other environmental causes such as opposition to the Alberta tar sands.3 A diving enthusiast and environmental activist, in June 2014 DiCaprio announced a $7 million pledge at the State Department's ‘Our Oceans’ conservation and preservation event to fund organizations and communities that are establishing marine reserves. Decrying ‘the Wild West on the high seas’, DiCaprio told the gathering, ‘We're plundering the ocean and its vital resources, and just because we can't see the devastation from dry land doesn't mean it's any less dangerous’ (Stanek, 2014; Warren, 2014).
Perhaps even more telling was a report that same day in the Washington Post revealing that US President Barack Obama would seek to ban fishing and energy exploration in a large area of the central Pacific Ocean using his executive powers (see Chapter 4). ‘The effects of climate change’, Obama said, ‘require new environmental protections’ (Snyder, 2014). A month later, the Global Ocean Commission, a high-level initiative captained by 17 blue-chip politicians, heads of major organizations and business leaders, including the former President of Costa Rica (José María Figueres) and former Prime Minister of Canada (Paul Martin), released their final report, From Decline to Recovery: A Rescue Package for the Global Ocean. Human activity, the Commission Report says, has put the world's oceans on a dangerous trajectory of decline, threatened right now by climate change, overfishing, plastic pollution, acidification, oil and gas spills; and, in the future, by deep-sea mineral mining, biological prospecting (bio-prospecting) and geo-engineering. In a ground-breaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, ranging from fossil records to statistics on modern container shipping, fish catches and seabed mining, a team of American scientists concluded that humans are causing unprecedented damage to the oceans. ‘We may be sitting on the precipice of a major extinction event,’ one of the study's authors ventured (Zimmer, 2015).
While there is a critical mass of scientific knowledge that illuminates and interrogates oceans from the various vantage points of marine biology, oceanography, physical geography, international law, global institutions/governance and environmental sustainability, it is more unusual to find research undertaken explicitly from a social science perspective. Until quite recently, the oceans remained ‘outside of history’; it is only in the last decade that the sea was finally recognized as one of the new frontiers for environmental historians (Bolster, 2006; Endfield, 2009). With the exception of the establishment of a research stream on maritime sociology within the European Sociological Association, ‘the sea remains generally a stranger to contemporary sociology’ (Cocco, 2013: 5). Traditionally, the world's ocean has received much less attention from geographers than has the terrestrial sphere. Most work in the sub-discipline of marine geography has tended to be descriptive, confirming the impression among many non-marine geographers that, in the words of Philip Steinberg (1999: 367), ‘the ocean (or the sea, an alternate term) is an uninteresting abyss that separates the places that “matter”, a marginal region that has little commonality with or impact on the physical and social processes that characterize the rest of the world.’ In addition to Steinberg's own pioneering work, one notable exception to this is Martin Glassner's (1990) book Neptune's Domain, commissioned in the wake of the signing of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (see Chapter 2 of this book).
In the present volume, I examine the past, present and future of deep oceans, employing a perspective informed by a combination of sociological constructivism and critical geopolitics. From this vantage point, the ‘deep’ is, on the one hand, a physical site sculpted by ocean currents, water temperature and pressure, seeps,4 seamounts (undersea mountains) and hydrothermal vents and, on the other, a human construct shaped by geographical knowledge, legal definitions, political ambitions and popular cultural texts involving conjecture, fantasy and speculation. One example of this is the distinction between the deep seabed portion of the high seas, where mining activity is supervised by the United Nations through the auspices of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), and the water column portion, where it is not. Another example is the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) (see Chapter 2), which was created by UNCLOS (United Nations Law of the Sea Conference) III on 10 December 1982 and entered into force on 16 November 1994. Extending outward for 200 nautical miles, and beyond in the case of continental shelves, the EEZ is collectively constructed by incorporating geographical, scientific and legal aspects. As for the continental shelf, it has recently been transformed from a definition ‘rooted’ in geo-science, which describes it as the relatively shallow seabed area adjacent to the coast and landward of the continental slope, to a legal-juridical definition that extends and prolongs it to ‘encompass the whole continental margin [the area of the sea floor between the coast of a continent and the plains of the deep ocean floor] and not only its inner, shallow parts in the scientific sense’ (Brekke, 1997: 39).
Each of these examples incorporates a kind of ‘volumetric understanding’, whereby the ocean is divided up and classified both vertically and horizontally.5 As Stuart Elden (2013) points out, we all too often think of the spaces of geography as areas or surfaces, not volumes possessing height and depth. Thinking of the ocean as a volume rather than an area avoids the trap of treating geopolitics as a flat discourse that privileges claims to territory.
A Discursive Approach to Studying Deep Oceans
The Nature of Discourse
Discourse refers to an interrelated set of storylines which interpret the world around us, and which become deeply embedded in societal institutions, agendas and knowledge claims (Hannigan, 2014: 72). It is enacted through a number of familiar devices of linguistic production: framing, metaphors, narrative and rhetoric. As Tom Mels (2009: 386) suggests, ‘the myriad things, processes, and relations we call environment, how they work, and how we should act toward them, are inherently discursive problems.’ That is, they are socially constructed and conveyed by language. By extension, environmental issues ‘do not present themselves in well-defined boxes labeled radiation, national parks, pandas, coral reefs, rainforest, heavy metal pollution, and the like’ (Dryzek, 2005: 8); rather, these are defined and elaborated through discursive interpretations and practices.
Contemporary discussions of discourse inevitably link it to the exercise of power. Invoking the path-breaking work of the French social theorist Michel Foucault (1980), most writers who privilege discourse understand it to be a form of ‘soft power’. Put simply, soft power is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion (Mathiason, 2007: 16; Nye, 2004). As such, it is a way of overriding institutions such as the state and church to control agendas and to incorporate individuals into relations of domination without having to resort to the use of force. Rather than being imposed from the top downwards, however, discourse takes the form of an ongoing cultural contest in which some players possess more resources than others. This is very much the case with environmental discourse, where the ways in which we speak, think about or act upon the biogeophysical world all take place within particular constellations of power (Mels, 2009: 387).
One important form of discourse is what is known as ‘policy discourse’. Steinberg (2014: 113) emphasizes that an invaluable source of insight into policy discourse can be the policy document. Policy documents may not be the only means by which discursive constructions of place are achieved and reproduced, but they are a useful portal through which to understand how statespersons frame problems and solutions. Vivian Schmidt (2008), a leading constructivist scholar in the discipline of political science, distinguishes between two fundamental forms of policy discourse: coordinative discourse among policy actors (civil servants, elected officials, experts, organized interests, activists) and communicative discourse between policy actors and the public at large. The former is a closed loop, wherein policy discussion and formation take place in a space isolated and shielded from public consciousness. By contrast, communicative discourse occurs openly in the political policy sphere and involves the deliberation on and legitimation of political ideas and their presentation to the general public. It is not unusual to find that these two forms of policy discourse function more or less separately. For example, state-of-the-art approaches to natural disaster mitigation and prevention that focus on vulnerability, risk reduction and adaptation are normally confined within coordinative as opposed to communicative discourse, resonating weakly in the public sphere, where humanitarian appeals for aid to stricken communities continue to dominate (Hannigan, 2012: 141).
Discourse and Critical Geopolitics
The concept of discourse plays a central role in critical geopolitics, a sub-field of political geography that first emerged in the 1990s. Practitioners of critical geopolitics study how government policy, wars and political events are depicted in ‘texts’ such as maps, speeches, policy documents and popular media (cartoons, comic books, films, newspapers, magazines, photographs) (see Dodds, 2013). Rather than being just representational, however, texts are said to be capable of influencing and in some circumstances even constructing the political world. Thus, the terms ‘Iron Curtain’, ‘Third World’ and ‘rogue state’, commonly utilized by politicians, diplomats, journalists and academics in the 1960s and 1970s, constituted more than geographical metaphors or descriptors. Rather, they generated a simple model of the world that informed foreign and security policy making, while at the same time powerfully shaping how the public at large understood the political geographies of the Cold War (Dodds, 2007: 4–5).
Martin Müller (2013: 54) observes that discourse acts as a ‘conceptual linchpin’ in critical geopolitics. As such, it possesses power, produces space and is bound up with questions of politics and ideology. Accordingly, Edward Said's seminal work Orientalism (1978) can justly be regarded as the first work of critical geopolitics insofar as it shows how the Western world constructed the ‘Orient’ as exotic and inferior. In a similar key, Frederick Turner's (1893) ‘frontier thesis’ exerted considerable influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on both academic and popular imaginaries of the West and American civil society (see Chapter 1).
Textual deconstruction in critical geopolitics has an uneasy relationship with human agency. On occasion, critical geopolitical analysts seem convinced that texts and discourse actually have agency, that is, that they are able to act on their own to challenge knowledge claims, construct (or deconstruct) meaning, produce publics and structure policies and politics. This is especially the case where discourses are bound up with everyday social practices. At other times, critical geopolitical researchers are more cautious, acknowledging only that discourses are socio-cultural resources that enable and constrain people's construct of meaning about their world (Müller, 2013: 57). In any case, discourse can never ‘act’ in a sociological sense – only people can do that (Hannigan, 2012).
Some of the most advanced work that has been undertaken from this perspective has focused on critical polar geopolitics. This interrogates ‘the intersections between territories and non-territories, legal regimes, knowledges, resources and public culture that combine to construct and represent the Arctic and Antarctic as spatial entities’ (Powell and Dodds, 2014: 9). A recent paper by Jason Dittmer and his co-authors (2011) highlights this treatment. The authors cast Arctic geopolitics as an emergent discourse, which they define as ‘a relatively organized assemblage of power/knowledge – via the dynamic assembly and networking of multiple elements across a wide variety of sites’ (2011: 1). They say that the standard ‘neo-realist’ depiction of the Arctic as ‘an opening, shifting and potentially chaotic space’ doesn't tell the whole story. In this widely circulated, orthodox version, a decrease in polar sea ice cover attributable to global climate change has spurred a host of new opportunities, possibilities and dangers. Dittmer et al. cite a piece by Scott G. Borgerson (2008) in the international relations journal Foreign Affairs that describes a new ‘scramble for resources’ in the region involving the five Arctic Ocean coastal states and their national security interests. This is symbolized by the widely publicized ‘planting’ of a Russian flag at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean during a 2007 polar expedition. Echoing the nineteenth-century competition by European imperialist powers for geopolitical supremacy in Central Asia, a ‘Great Game’ is currently said to be taking place at the top of the world among the superpower nations (China, Russia, the United States) with a supporting cast of regional political players (Canada, Denmark, Norway).
Dittmer and his colleagues suggest that ‘there is far more to geopolitics in the “High North”’ (2011: 11). Spatial orderings of the region have historically been conditioned by a variety of images, fantasies and projections of frontier masculine exploration and adventure. The authors explore these via three examples: a pair of 2009 Arctic exhibitions in London; the 2005 Russian polar expedition; and ongoing ‘sovereignty patrols’ by the Canadian Rangers, a unit of the armed forces which engages in patrols and surveillance in the Arctic North. This alternative reading nourishes the prevailing discourse of an escalating ‘Arctic race’ for wealth, resources and sovereignty, but it is more nuanced and historically rooted. The same argument could be made for the importance of a ‘masculine’ political style. This is illustrated by news clips of Russian President Vladimir Putin skydiving, skiing down a volcano and hugging a polar bear (likely sedated) on a trip to Russia's Arctic North; and by Cossacks on horses whipping Pussy Riot protesters at the Sochi Olympics, both of which help to legitimate Russian national identity politics, as manifested in military incursions into Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
The Discursive Construction of the Ocean
Published in 2001, geographer Philip Steinberg's book The Social Construction of the Ocean remains the seminal, and indeed the only, full-length treatment of human–marine interactions that deliberately adopts a discursive perspective. Whereas most studies of marine areas treat the ocean exclusively as a resource space used by society, Steinberg views it as a social space, a space of society (2001: 6). He identifies discourse construction as the third pillar of the territorial political economy perspective that he employs to analyse the social construction of ocean space in the modern era (the other two pillars being use and regulation). The author offers this as a contrast to, and improvement on, traditional perspectives that treat the ocean exclusively as a resource space designed and managed by land-based societies for commercial and military advantage. In Steinberg's view, the ocean is ‘simultaneously an arena wherein social conflicts occur and a space shaped by these conflicts’ (2001: 20).
It is rare to find an approach to nature, especially that which puts representation or discourse at the centre, which attempts to fuse radical political economy and social construction. In so doing, Steinberg calls to mind the work of several political ecology scholars (e.g. Stephen Bunker, Paul Cicantell) who wrote in the 1990s about discursive struggles on the socially and geographically remote extractive periphery. Paul Cicantell (1999) published a case study of the Tucurui dam project in the eastern Amazon region in which he demonstrated that a discourse of development promoted by powerful external actors (the Brazilian government, a Japanese private consortium) was crowding out competing discourses of social justice and environmental preservation, as presented by indigenous people. It incorporates the now familiar assumptions about the problematic interrelationship of resource extraction, economic growth and human progress.
Steinberg introduces three primary ‘discourses’ which he says frequently inform the construction of ocean space. The first category, the discourse of development, echoes what political ecology researchers have found for land-based resource frontiers such as the Amazonian rainforest. Steinberg notes our past tendency to construct the sea as a kind of ‘non-territory’ that defies any form of development, but argues that this is still consistent with a development discourse of scientific rationality and space-oriented planning. Second, Steinberg cites a discourse of geopolitics. For geopolitical discourse the key spatial unit is the territorially defined state, which interacts with the world's other states (Steinberg, 2001: 34). Geopolitical discourse constructs the sea as external to the territory of political society. As with the discourse of development, it is assumed that the ocean is a void, but, rather than being developable, the goal is to make it governable.
Steinberg's third category is the discourse of law. This considers whether the sea is immune to social control and order. It is presented here as an external space, a ‘lawless other’. The prevailing idea in legal discourse is that of mutually exclusive sovereign nation-state territories representing the rule of law and space of society. For example, as the Law of the Sea evolves to permit the extension of the continental shelf, nation states assume legal or at least legally sanctioned economic control over previously unregulated ocean space. All three of these discursive constructions have been significantly buttressed by cartographic representations of ocean space. A map not only represents a pre-formed reality but it also constitutes that reality, especially in places like the deep ocean that are likely never to be encountered during the everyday lives of a map's viewers (Steinberg, 2001: 35).
Steinberg locates his territorial political economy within several macro-theories of capitalist spatiality, notably world-systems theory, which was first developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, an American sociologist, in the 1970s. Perhaps reflecting his book's publication date of 2001, he does not substantially address neoliberalism, which, as Becky Mansfield (2004: 313) noted a decade ago, ‘is becoming a dominant mode of ocean governance’, especially with reference to ocean fisheries.6 In neoliberal regulation, states and markets act in concert, enclosing the oceans as state property, creating, devolving and enforcing property rights (2004: 315).
Despite the title of Steinberg's book, this is more a work of political economy than of social constructivism. In his review of the book in the American Journal of Sociology, my environmental sociology colleague Mike Bell (2003: 218) writes: ‘[A]lthough Steinberg tries to develop a dialectic approach, one side in the debate is still privileged. That side is the material not the ideal, as one might assume for the usual association of the term constructionism with discourse and representation.’
In the present volume I share some of Steinberg's key assumptions – notably, that the ocean is both a space of society and an arena of social conflict. However, I am less interested in framing ocean-state constructions within a theoretical framework that focuses primarily on the material organization of society or the global economic order. Rather, as the title indicates, I focus on how the geopolitics of the deep has been constructed within the parameters of four competing narratives (see below). Only one of these (‘Sovereignty Games’) incorporates a standard understanding of geopolitical discourse as ‘the representation of space as constructed as a result of nation states interacting with other nation states’, a mode of thinking that Steinberg (2001: 34) criticizes for treating the ocean as an empty ‘force-field’. Although the book is organized by these storylines, it is not focused exclusively on texts and representations to the exclusion of political economy, a criticism often directed against critical geopolitics by scholars from the ‘radical geopolitics’ school of thought (Mercille, 2013: 133–4). Indeed, I have made a concerted effort to expose the political economic dynamics of deep-ocean exploration and exploitation, using the method of historical description and analysis rather than critical interrogation. I adopted this approach because I assume most readers only possess scattered knowledge about the deep and would appreciate an informed and readable overview.
The Geopolitics of the Deep: Four Narratives
In this book, I argue that the contemporary geopolitics of the deep ocean is constructed through and around four competing master narratives (big stories), which I have labelled: Oceanic Frontiers; Governing the Abyss; Sovereignty Games; and Saving the Ocean. Rather than being completely self-contained and mutually exclusive, these narratives frequently overlap, collude and collide within a ‘discursive policy field’ (Hannigan, 2012). For example, territorial claims by coastal states to extensions of the continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles are pursued under the legal auspices of the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS) (Governing the Abyss narrative); undertaken, at least in part, to secure control over untapped seabed natural resources (oil, gas, minerals) (Oceanic Frontiers narrative); and treated as a geopolitical contest in which political and military strategizing is front and centre (Sovereignty Games narrative).
The four narratives differ substantially in the way they perceive the oceanic commons. Commons are collectively managed, shared resources (Milun, 2011: 1). They can range from very small (an apartment complex parking lot) to vast (the high seas, outer space) (Buck, 1998: 5). Garrett Hardin, the American microbiologist and ecologist, made the term iconic in his 1968 essay in Science, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. Hardin drew an analogy between the medieval English village commons, used by locals for livestock grazing, and the contemporary resource commons. Global commons are areas of the earth that are not owned by any particular country, and to which all nations have legal access (Aplin et al., 1995: 230). Just as medieval pastures were over-exploited and exhausted, without international cooperation, the global commons faces the same fate. A good example of this is overfishing. According to the Brundtland Commission, ‘Only the high seas outside of national jurisdiction are truly “commons”; but fish species, pollution, and other effects of economic development do not respect these legal boundaries’ (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987: 262). There appear to be only two alternatives to the tragedy of the commons: divide the resources or depend on explicit institutions and rules to manage it (Bederman, 2008: 71).
Oceanic Frontiers is the most laissez-faire of the narratives in its treatment of the commons. The deep is depicted here as a ‘resource cornucopia’. All that is required is that it be ‘harvested’ wisely and properly. The Sovereignty Games narrative does not accept the notion of the commons as constituting common property. Rather, the oceans collectively constitute a chessboard on which political moves are strategically made and territory is claimed. From this vantage point, ‘No nation can be a pretender to global influence without a strong maritime presence’ (Marx, 1981: 3). The Governing the Abyss narrative embraces the idea of ‘sharing the commons’ and the ‘abyss’ refers as much to a physical feature as it does to a sense that these spaces are beyond the regulatory geographies of state sovereignty. This is embodied in the concept of the ‘common heritage of [hu]mankind’, a guiding principle behind the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention (LOSC), the cornerstone of modern ocean law. To be sure, the tools of global governance are valued here, but first and foremost as a way of redressing the fundamental inequality between have and have-not nations. Saving the Oceans comes closest of the four deep-ocean narratives to subscribing to Hardin's analogy of the ‘tragedy of the commons’. It doesn't matter how equally and justly the spoils are divided if, in the end, ocean resources are totally exhausted or the sea floor is contaminated. Consistent with the position each of the four deep-ocean narratives takes towards the maritime commons, I have subtitled each of the chapters that constitute the body of this book as: Harvesting the Commons; Sharing the Commons; Claiming the Commons; and Protecting the Commons.
In the scholarly field of international relations, there have been two dominant paradigms: realism and idealism. The realist paradigm assumes that states are the lead actors on the world stage and that power drives all politics. Sovereignty – the idea that states possess exclusive authority over their territory and population – forms the foundation of their rule. By contrast, idealism (or liberalism) holds that states compete not only in the international arena among themselves but also with non-state actors such as multinational corporations, IGOs (intergovernmental organizations), NGOs (non-governmental organizations), global advocacy groups and epistemic communities. The second part of the twentieth century, it is said, was characterized by a move from a world dominated by a single chessboard – the strategic diplomatic one associated with a realistic perspective – to a world dispersed into a variety of chessboards (Rochester, 2006: 24), as might be explained by the idealist paradigm. In recent years, a third paradigm,7constructivism
