Super Highway E-Book

Chris Parry

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 685

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

In Super Highway, maritime strategist and former Rear Admiral Chris Parry argues that in the second decade of the 21st century, the sea is set to reclaim its status as the world's pre-eminent strategic medium. Almost everything that travels virtually between continents and states on the Internet moves, in reality, as in previous eras of globalization, across, under or over the sea. Parry makes the case that the next decade will witness a 'scramble' for the sea, involving competition for oceanic resources and the attempted political and economic colonization of large tracts of what have, until now, been considered international waters and shipping routes. Can the UK, with its seafaring history, reclaim the waves? With space travel no longer on the agenda, the sea (the physical equivalent of the world-wide-web) is effectively the world's final undiscovered frontier and the potential arena for a classic 'Great Game' between the major powers and developing states.

Leseprobe

SUPER HIGHWAY

SEA POWER IN THE 21ST CENTURY

CHRIS PARRY

For John Jenkyn Parry – mae'r tad gorau yn y byd.

Contents

Introduction

1. Globalisation and Sea Power

2. Today’s Global Super Highway

3. Sea Power Today

4. A Changing Seascape

5. New Opportunities

6. New Technologies

7. Security at Sea

8. Strategic Competition

9. Maritime Warfare

10. What’s a Country to Do?

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Picture Credits

Index

Introduction

This book is not intended to be, and cannot be, an authoritative history or definitive account of sea power. Nor is it a theoretical primer or doctrinal guide for budding naval commanders. There are books that fulfil those functions well;1 this one simply seeks to identify and illuminate some major themes associated with the use of the sea as a source of geopolitical power in the twenty-first century.

The sea is the World Ocean, the connected body of salt water that covers 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface. It is important in regulating and moderating the Earth’s climate, in providing food and oxygen, in its enormous diversity of life and for navigation. The sea can be used as a medium – for transport and warfare – and as a resource. Just as in earlier periods of history, technological advance is enabling further progress in the use of the sea, not only in terms of transport this time, but also with regard to its exploitation. Most importantly, it is largely the common heritage of mankind and available for use by anyone capable of mastering and employing the technical requirements.

Anyone who goes down to the seashore is looking at an unbroken mass of water that stretches around the whole world. Every drop or molecule of seawater forms an unbroken chain of continuity and connectivity with all the others on the planet. The tiny portion of sea in view is directly linked to waves rolling onto a beach in Japan or to currents streaming under the Arctic ice.

In 1929, a team of German scientists set out to track the journey of a bottle that had been dropped in the southern Indian Ocean with a note inside asking the finder to record the location where it washed up and to throw it back into the sea. By 1935, when it was found and retired in East Africa, it had rounded the world and travelled approximately 25,750 km (16,000 miles), the longest recorded distance travelled by an inanimate object.

In fact, 1935 was a good year for messages in bottles. Chunosuke Matsuyama had been stranded on a coral reef in the Pacific in 1784, without food or water, after his fishing boat was wrecked. Before his death, he carved an account of what had happened on a piece of wood, which he sealed in a bottle. In 1935, 151 years after it had been set afloat, the bottle finally washed up in the small Japanese village where Matsuyama had been born.

The point is that any of us could this very instant sail, without let or hindrance, to anywhere in the world that is connected to the sea – to the 150 or so countries with a coast – and without anyone’s approval, license or sanction, unless we wished to land. This ‘open architecture’ of the sea is much like the Internet; in their respective physical and virtual ways, both enable the connectivity, interdependence and extraordinary economic vitality of our world.

Globalisation as it is typically understood today is an expression of the many ways in which people worldwide are connected with each other. This non-physical globalisation – the exchange of information, ideas, images and resources – results in physical expressions of worldwide connectivity, such as human contact, the trade in goods and services, and warfare. The indirect, virtual component of globalisation is almost exclusively associated with communications and information systems, while the direct element, involving physical connectivity, relies on the ability to use the sea as an indispensable physical medium across, through and above which all human interaction and exchange takes place. The integration of the world economy and the interdependence of increasing numbers of countries on international trade and access for their continued security, social stability and prosperity mean that the security and environmental sustainability of the sea, and its integrity as a system, are of critical importance to the peace and economic health of the world.

A more interconnected world, allowing an ever-expanding and interdependent interchange of goods, services and people, has meant that sea power today is expressed and employed in more subtly diverse ways than it was in the past. In particular, sea power is used in a permissive international system, in which cooperative political and collaborative economic considerations predominate, mainly because the current situation suits the purposes of the majority of states and corporations. It seems certain that increased use of the sea in the twenty-first century is likely to mirror and parallel the revolutionary consequences and continuing growth of the new age of virtual communication and progress.

Thus, the sea acts as a super highway that allows us to pass over it upon our lawful occasions, as the British naval prayer has it, granting us access to a watery worldwide web. Preserving the ‘freedom of the seas’, allowing universal and global access to the sea both as a means of transport and trade, and as a means of extracting resources, is crucial to the global economy and international relations between states.

For states, the ability to use the sea freely – unlike airspace, which is subject to the rules and regulations of the states below it – allows governments to intervene militarily in situations at a time and place of political choice, in order to influence events and decisions in the national interest. As the British admiral and noted stentorian, Jacky Fisher, had it, ‘the whole principle of naval fighting is to be free to go anywhere with every damned thing the Navy possesses’.2 Translated into the modern political vernacular, it means the ability of a state, or group of states, to influence a part of the world wherever and whenever it wants. And not just in terms of the ability to coerce: ‘Whosoever commands the sea, commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.’3 No other strategic medium, as yet, offers this freedom of choice and action.

From any historical perspective, the importance of sea power to a country’s sense of itself and ability to get its way in the world are evident. Sea power is most commonly associated with the might of naval forces but, in reality, it is based on two simple concepts: the ability of a state, group, company or individual to use the sea for its own benefit (for political, commercial or private reasons) and, if required, to deny its use to others. The critical tension is between forces that are trying to achieve sea control and those that are attempting to deny them that control.

There are two main types of sea power in operation today. Hard sea power is associated with the ability to threaten or employ violence and coercion as an instrument of policy. Soft sea power is generally associated with exploitation of the sea’s resources and the movement of goods along sea lines of communication. In some cases, as is the case with China, the difference between the state and private sectors is indistinguishable. Here, hard power and soft power are wielded together.

In both its hard and soft forms, sea power covers at least four elements: the control and practice of international trade and commerce; the use and control of ocean resources; the operation of maritime forces in war; and the use of navies and maritime economic power as instruments of diplomacy, deterrence and influence in peacetime. In this regard, appearances can be deceptive: the most powerful navy in the world is that of the USA; the largest merchant fleet is held by the Greeks; the largest fishing fleet, by volume and activity, is the Chinese; and the biggest commercial shipping company is Danish. In this sense, sea power is diffused.

Sea power does not have to be legal in its expression and use and is not always the preserve of states or corporations. Traffickers – of drugs, exploited people and other illicit goods – routinely abuse the freedom of the seas, and pirates demonstrate sea power when engaging in armed robbery and ransoms. Conversely, navies and law enforcement authorities, in the right hands, could perhaps be said to function as the equivalent of an anti-virus and anti-malware protection for the international system. At one end, they deal with pirates, traffickers and terrorists (the seagoing equivalent of malware) and at the other with adventurous states and opportunist regimes as one would with major cyber-attacks. Most of the time, computer users are unaware of their anti-virus systems working; they are usually only alerted on those occasions when there is a serious attack. So it is with navies. It is difficult to know what might happen if they were not there; these situations are Conan Doyle’s (sea) dogs that didn’t bark in the night.4

From the earliest periods of recorded history, sea power, and its use to further political and economic objectives, has always been the litmus test of a great power, one whose reach and influence extended beyond its immediate horizon and local region. With more than 70 per cent of the globe covered by sea, and 90 per cent of trade, by weight and volume, moving by sea, the effective deployment of maritime power confers the political and economic leadership of the known world. The sea is also the indispensable means by which any armed force or humanitarian response can cross to other continents in strength and in bulk; and it is the only means of reaching an opponent or community if access to air routes and forward bases for aircraft are denied or unavailable. There is simply no substitute for sea power. Without being able to access the sea in some way, an economy is not likely to benefit in any meaningful way from globalisation. While the sea is the medium of globalisation, sea power provides its engine, fuelled by states and commercial companies in the pursuit of their own interests, in response to risks and opportunities.

The freedom and connectivity of the seas have only survived over the centuries because states have been strong and self-interested enough to preserve the principle that innocent passage and lawful exchange at sea should be respected and safeguarded. It is a familiar saying that peace at sea does not keep itself and it should be recognised that, in the modern world, globalisation and the freedom of the sea are guarded and guaranteed by the political will, vigilance and fighting power of the USA, specifically through the agency of the US Navy and its sister Services. Along with its allies and partners, who also have an interest in the secure, uninterrupted use of the sea, the maritime power of the USA has been exercised, since the end of the Cold War, in the absence of any significant threat to its dominance.

At the start of a century that is already witnessing significant changes to the balance of power in the international landscape, the only certainty is that countries will continue to make decisions on the basis of their own interests, with regimes (whether democratic or authoritarian) determining which policies will preserve or extend their legitimacy in the eyes of their elites or populations. Therefore, states may operate either inside or outside the system depending on the balance of risk or advantage. Experience has shown that it would be prudent for both navies and shipowners, thinking strategically, to prepare for both eventualities.

A casual glance at the current maritime scene suggests that competition and cooperation by states within a globalised international system will continue to define the opening decades of the twenty-first century. The sea will maintain its role as an indispensable medium of global exchange and access. Nevertheless, there are indications that, over the next ten years, we will inhabit a progressively more complex, challenging and unpredictable world, shaped by the reality and uneven impact of climate change, resource competition and intensifying globalisation. There will also be ongoing risks associated with the political and economic imbalances, social inequalities and perceived injustices in every aspect of human life. Challenges to governance and order, rapid advances in knowledge and innovation and fluid attitudes to identity and interest will further complicate the geostrategic tensions, likely to be caused both by the projected imbalance between population and resources and by severe regional demographic pressures.

In parallel, states are beginning to exert increasing levels of control over their littoral regions and the resources of their exclusive economic zones, encroaching on the rights of innocent passage traditionally associated with the freedom of the seas. Many are also investing significantly in military and naval capability. China, in particular, seeks sovereign rights over much of the South China Sea, well beyond its maritime entitlements as designated in international maritime agreements.

There is also likely to be a ‘scramble’ by states and commercial enterprises in the high seas and the deep oceans. Here, the prospect of diminishing edible fish stocks and (as technology delivers viable extraction solutions) the appeal of commercially viable, exploitable natural resources will encourage states to encroach on what until now has been seen as international space. It is probable that there will be an increasing incidence of arbitrary and contested actions as states, especially totalitarian and marginally democratic regimes, and commercial organisations seek to assert unilateral claims, pursue their own interests or prevent others from doing so.

All these factors have implications for those states that rely on an open trading system and the freedom of the seas for the security of their homelands, the health of their economies and the promotion of their interests. They will also challenge existing notions about the way in which the sea is used. New relationships and responsibilities with regard to governance on the high seas and in the littoral regions of the world are likely to emerge in the coming years. Without a credible universal regulatory regime, an era of residual claims, uncertain jurisdictions and competing interests is likely to present countless opportunities for confrontation and conflict, especially in the ungoverned, poorly regulated coastal areas of weak or failed states, as well as in the ‘scramble’ to control and exploit the resources of the high seas.

Those states with an interest in maintaining the international order, for their own advantage, will use their naval power to ensure access not only for their own commerce, but also for that of the world in general and their economic partners in particular. Conversely, other countries that benefit less from an ordered international trading system – for example, aspiring regional or economic powers or restrictive regimes – are likely to want to find ways to restrict or close down parts of the international system or to control it for their own benefit.

As a result, modern maritime forces will still be required to ensure national security and secure the sea in terms of access and trade, especially for natural resources and energy products. They will also be expected to act in those circumstances when state or international authority is weak or ineffectual, in response to the threats from irregular activity, lawless behaviour and naturally induced extreme weather or other events.

Given emerging conditions and trends, it is likely that America and its friends will be increasingly challenged at sea by aspiring regional powers in the years ahead, both commercially and militarily. In addition, their capacity to prevent infractions of international law may become more difficult as states and companies take unilateral action in responding to opportunities presented by local and regional political, economic and demographic conditions. There is also a risk that the USA will tire of ensuring the security of an international system that is upheld not only for the benefit of its own trade, security and prosperity, but also for the benefit of its economic and strategic challengers.

Globalisation has been seen to ebb and flow; historians have spoken of waves and storm surges of globalisation, in response to major changes, discontinuities and imbalances in the international system. In the worst case, globalisation could ebb again and the world would revert to competing – and conflicting – regional, ideological or trading blocs. In this scenario, just as some states (such as China and other restrictive regimes) have done with the Internet, powerful states and assertive corporate players could threaten to make the universal access and freedom enjoyed today on the high seas a thing of the past. Renewed attempts to impose mare clausum (‘closed sea’, under the jurisdiction of a particular state), at the expense of mare liberum (‘free sea’, open to all countries), would not only overturn the trading system that has sustained globalisation for over 500 years, but also determine the balance of power and advantage in the twenty-first century. In these circumstances, history and emerging conditions suggest that the twenty-first century is unlikely to remain quiet for those who ‘pass on the seas upon their lawful occasions’.5

.

__________

1 Notably, but not exclusively, Geoff Till, Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century (2004).

2 Sir John Fisher, Memories (1919).

3 Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘A Discourse of the Invention of Ships, Anchors, Compass, etc.’ in The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh, Kt., vol. 8 (1829, reprinted 1965).

4 In Silver Blaze (1892).

5 A Prayer to be used at Sea, from the Book of Common Prayer.

CHAPTER ONE

Globalisation and Sea Power

‘When man ceased to look upon streams, rivers, and seas as barriers and learned to use them as highways, he made a giant stride toward civilization. The waterways of the world provided a new mobility – to man himself, later to the products of his toil and skill, and at all times to his ideas.’1

Until the early modern period, oceanic travel was the exception rather than the rule, with only the Arabs and the Chinese venturing beyond the coastal regions of their known and familiar horizons, and not far beyond. Apart from the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea, Europeans had made the Atlantic coast of their continent the limit of their ambition, with settlement of Greenland and Iceland and what proved to be unsustainable ventures beyond into the vastness of the North Atlantic.

This situation changed in the wake of the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 and the ‘Reconquista’ of the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, leaving the Western European monarchies free from the threat of external predators (if not struggles among themselves) and able to speculate about what the Atlantic might offer. The voyages and explorations of Columbus, Magellan and da Gama, at the start of the early modern period, kicked off the process of globalisation as Europe began to reach out across the oceans and the world became increasingly connected through the medium of the sea. As these maritime ventures continued to expand, states were able to take advantage of the new opportunities opening up in terms of trade routes, the exploitation of resources and the ability to exert military influence on the oceans. The fortunes of states became linked to their ability to access and exploit the seas, with globalisation, hand-in-hand with the development of sea power, becoming the driving force for imperial ambition and economic success.

The period led to the formation and growth of successive world-spanning maritime empires. Great Britain built and maintained an extensive empire through the maintenance of a network of markets and colonies, fuelled by trade, whose security and integrity were guaranteed by the barrels of naval guns and the cutlasses of its semi-mythic naval heroes. Although the maritime empires of Spain, Portugal, then the Dutch, French and English faced opposition and challenge in turn, not least from each other, no other power outside Europe or the Americas had the technical, organisational and industrial capacity to break the monopoly of sea power held by the Western world. The only non-Western power that ever came close to establishing a maritime-based empire, but only on a regional basis, was Japan in the Second World War. Its success was temporary and dependent on the peculiar conditions that prevailed while Britain and the USA were distracted by the necessity of defeating Nazi Germany and its Axis allies in Europe. Western maritime dominance resumed, this time led by the USA, although the European empires did not long survive the austerities that afflicted the home countries and the nationalist aspirations of their former colonies.

THE PRE-MODERN ERA

Until the time of the great oceanic voyages of the fifteenth century, maritime dominance had been always regional in its extent and ambition, constrained by the limitations of naval technology, an imperfect understanding of oceanic weather patterns and the presence of substantial regional powers determined to hold their own against interlopers. The limited maritime operations of the Greeks and Romans in the Mediterranean, with their extensions into the Black Sea and Red Sea and onto the Atlantic coast, disappeared amid the collapse of the classical world. In the ensuing fragmentation and instability, the idea of a securely navigable, accessible and interconnected world suffered something of a setback as both maritime and intellectual horizons closed down considerably. These gave way to contested sea-spaces and trading routes in the Mediterranean and around the Atlantic coast, occupied by no single dominant power and menaced by raiders, predatory warlords and dynastic rivalry.

The next phase, from the ninth century, was characterised by the rise of Italian maritime city-states (notably Venice, Genoa and Pisa), successively trading with the Levant and helping themselves to the spoils of the Crusades and the break-up of the Byzantine Empire. The key to sea power in the pre-modern era was the ability to maintain a balance between the need to sustain a profitable trading fleet in times of peace and stability and the ability to generate sufficient fighting power in wartime. Meanwhile, the Red Sea and Indian Ocean were controlled without serious opposition or competition – apart from the threat from pirates – by the warships and merchants of Islam, whose coercive power dominated the Red Sea, the western Indian Ocean and whose commercial reach extended to India and China.

Further East, Chinese imperial regimes, notably the Song and Ming dynasties, held most of what we now know as South East Asia and East Asia in a tribute-based political and economic system, whose power at sea was built around intricate trading networks, a huge fleet of powerful warships and the resources of the world’s largest economy. Chinese ships at the time of the Ming emperors were rightly famous and remarked upon by European commentators. At about 120 m (400 ft) in length, with up to nine masts, watertight bulkheads and innovative technologies, they dwarfed comparable Western models, both in scale and sophistication. Such was the maritime dominance of the Ming dynasty fleets that, in the early fifteenth century, the great Ming Navy consisted of 3,500 vessels, 2,700 of which were warships stationed along the length of the coast of China.

Any account of China’s maritime heritage has to mention Zheng He, a eunuch admiral, who commanded powerful ‘treasure’ fleets, comprising warships and merchantmen, on a succession of wide-ranging tribute-collecting, exploratory and trading voyages between 1405 and 1433. The scope of his operations extended to the Gulf and East Africa in the west, to all of South East Asia and to the Malaysian and Indonesian archipelagoes. Gavin Menzies in his book 1421 would have us believe that he went even further than that, but the argument would appear to become progressively more circumstantial, though no less engaging, the further the book, and its hero, travel from China.

The expeditionary voyages of Chinese Admiral Zheng He, 1405–33.

However, Chinese maritime dominance only effectively extended to the South China Sea and coastal waters. Expeditions and trading that took in East Asia, the Indian Ocean and East Africa were less controllable and secure, as much of the trade was in the hands of Muslim merchants, who had a particularly strong grip on the Indian Ocean and the routes to the Indies. The Chinese never sought to challenge Muslim control of this trade; forward bases or emporiums were never established to offset the logistical challenges of projecting and sustaining power so far away. The Chinese knew about Europe, but were emphatically a regional power; they did not need anything from beyond their region, except what they chose to import on their own terms by means of middlemen.

Chinese sea power foundered on ideology and political partisanship. The philosophy of Confucianism emphasised the virtue of agriculture and was decidedly sniffy about the benefits to be gained from commercial activity and trade, while condemning the baleful consequences of contact with culturally inferior foreigners. As a result, even under the first Ming emperor, who was a strong believer in sea power, maritime trade and some foreign goods were banned and tribute was the only commodity that could legally be carried into Chinese ports by foreign ships. Other reasons for the decline of such a formidable ocean-going capability were linked to the power politics within the Imperial Court and economic stresses. Indeed, they have a familiar modern ring to them and present an instructive parable to our ears today. Factional disputes at court (party politics) and a hostile Confucian bureaucracy eventually scuppered the sea expeditions, limiting ship size and civilian participation in overseas trade (over-regulation), with the result that shipyards for large ocean-going junks were closed (industrial decline and loss of sovereign capacity) and Chinese naval technology lost its momentum (loss of research and development). By the sixteenth century, few shipwrights knew how to build the large ocean-going ships (loss of industrial expertise and skills). The development of guns and cannon also slowed, allowing the European powers to outmatch the Chinese in firepower. Finally, the expenditure on Chinese naval capability could not easily be justified in the absence of an opponent that presented a similar level of threat (also eerily familiar). As a result, the Chinese progressively lost their technological edge over the West, never to regain it.

The decline of Chinese maritime power and presence left the seas open for Europe. In 1453, the Turks captured Constantinople (Istanbul) and for eighty years they and their co-religionists along the North African littoral fought with Christian Europe for maritime supremacy in the Mediterranean. By the closing years of the sixteenth century, this struggle was effectively over – in the short run, after the Turks were firstly repulsed at Malta in 1565 and then defeated in the last major fleet action involving galleys at Lepanto in 1571 and, in the long run, once technically and tactically superior types of vessels, guns and technologies were introduced by the Europeans.

Thus, at almost exactly the same time as European seamen started to expand their horizons and probe the possibilities offered by oceanic travel, the pre-eminent maritime power and presence of the time, Imperial China, made a strategic decision to turn its back on globalisation and sea power and withdraw into a state of self-regarding self-sufficiency. Two centuries or more later, China would be wrenched into the global system, like it or not, according to the will of those maritime powers that did grasp the opportunities – and overcome the challenges – of globalisation.

THE BEGINNINGS OF GLOBALISATION

Amid this pattern of regionally based political, cultural and economic systems, at what point do we identify the first inkling of globalisation, the earliest moment at which most of the people in the world knew that they were capable of being connected to most of the other people in the world? At what point in time did humanity gain an understanding of the global nature of its existence and an awareness of the existence and shape of most of the inhabited land masses? Adam Smith, with his good sense about most things, probably got it right: ‘The discovery of America and that of a passage to the East Indies by way of the Cape of Good Hope are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.’2

It is clear that the super highway really gets going in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, a remarkable period in the history of globalisation and sea power, with attempts by the Europeans living on the Atlantic coast to gain access by sea to Oriental markets that overland were dominated by hostile powers, Italian middlemen and high prices. It is worth remembering that, before those events, no one is recorded as having any meaningful knowledge of the existence and extent of the north and south halves of the American continent. When the early explorers set out from late medieval Europe, they travelled more in hope than in expectation. Indeed, in 1492, when Christopher Columbus, the ‘discoverer’ of America, landed on an even now unidentified3 island in the Bahamas, he thought that he had reached China. He quickly realised that he had discovered an island and his next expedition from there set out to prove that he could still reach China by sea. He was still not aware that America was in the way and continued to be remarkably steadfast in his original pursuit of a direct route to China. If the giant land mass of America and its offshore islands had not been in the way, we probably would never have heard of Columbus again, except as a footnote in the history of the joint reign of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile.

Oceanic routes had not been attempted before because technology and the accumulated store of human knowledge did not encourage extended voyages to be undertaken with confidence. There were also insufficient incentives to bypass familiar trade routes, by risking life and fortune on the high seas. In this sense, it is significant that Columbus was the first seafarer to demonstrate the viability of linking continents by oceanic travel. All previous trading and movements of people had occurred over land or along coastlines by ships probing short distances at a time, as with Vasco da Gama and the Portuguese explorers. As far as possible, they had maintained close contact with the land or had used known features to navigate from point to point all the way down the west coast of Africa and into the Indian Ocean. This willingness and ability to navigate successfully across the oceans represented the point at which trade went intercontinental and viral and the process of globalisation began. The oceans were the decisive facilitator of globalisation.

Oceanic travel and trade were made possible for Europeans by the arrival of sturdier ocean-going ships, new arrangements of sails and more reliable compasses and charts, which enabled voyages to reach out further into the Atlantic and along the African coast. Significant improvements to cannon and firearms arrived at just the right time to deal with any hostile or uncooperative elements that might be encountered. With their experience of life at sea in the Mediterranean, the Spanish and the Portuguese knew that if they wanted to trade, they needed to be prepared to fight. There were hostile potentates, pirates and brigands out there, not to mention various terrors of the deep (all graphically illustrated in the blank areas and margins of charts) that might require some careful handling. Coupled with the sailing characteristics of their late fifteenth-century ships, this technological edge gave European seamen in remote, uncharted waters a decided superiority in terms of manoeuvre and in the use of organised violence in support of their trading and other speculative ventures. It is an edge that Western countries have been careful to preserve throughout the centuries.

The subsequent age of exploration and colonisation saw countries becoming richer and more powerful through increasing levels of exchange. In a competitive market, it was always likely that power struggles would break out between the maritime rivals. When sea powers clashed, the country with the most skilled seamen and the most effective, innovative use of its ships and guns usually prevailed. In particular, the possession of relatively rapid-firing, reliable guns and more manoeuvrable designs of fighting ship saw the progressive defeat of countries that relied on boarding and fighting land battles at sea. Ships were now able to stand well clear of their opponents and either sink or pound them into submission. Thus, the English were able to defeat the Spanish in the Armada year of 1588 and in a whole series of running fights the length and breadth of the Americas, just as the Portuguese had defeated the forces of Islam at the Battle of Diu in the Indian Ocean earlier in the century.

INTRODUCING INTERNATIONAL MARITIME LAW

Increasing levels of bitter rivalry and power struggles between the European nations, as they all continued to attempt to exert their power on the seas, had resulted in serious demarcation disputes and highlighted the need for some form of international agreements regarding access to the seas, trade and transport. In the marginal balance of risk and reward, conditions of anarchy and free-for-all in the remote regions of the sea were not in any country’s interest, least of all those with what would now be called ‘first-mover advantage’.

In 1494, the Pope, in the Treaty of Tordesillas, allowed Spain and Portugal exclusive rights to travel and trade globally to the west and east respectively of an arbitrary and geographically doubtful line drawn down the Atlantic. The treaty was of course only applicable and enforceable if the two countries had the will and power to prevent intrusions and infractions. The determination and ability of the English, the French and the Dutch over the next century to circumvent the cosy Iberian arrangement reflected a combination of entrepreneurial initiative, religious zeal (after the Reformation began to take hold) and commercial opportunity, as well as the complicity, indifference and occasional energetic and clumsy reprisals of the colonial authorities and mother countries. Interlopers were always liable to be caught out under the ‘catch me if you can’ principle, and outright war from time to time complicated things still further. There was good money to be made where legal theory came up against commercial impulse, private ambition and consumer demand in an environment that was indifferently policed. Legal theory came off decidedly worse.

On 25 February 1603, three ships from the Dutch East India Company seized an anchored Portuguese merchant ship, the Santa Catarina, off the coast of what is now Singapore. As Portugal had been absorbed into the Spanish crown in 1580 and the Netherlands was at war with Spain, the Dutch presumably did not take long to assess that the ship was fair game. This view was probably encouraged by the likelihood that she was carrying valuable cargo. Having captured her after a stiff fight of a few hours, it transpired that the Santa Catarina had 1,200 bales of Chinese raw silk and a substantial amount of musk on board. A quick calculation established that the value of this cargo would more than double the capital of the Dutch East India Company.

The problem was that under Dutch law the capture of the prize and its cargo was of uncertain legality, and international (and some Dutch) opinion, in its ponderous pre-modern way, was not entirely happy with the Dutch keeping what were considered ill-gotten gains. There were also considerable doubts about whether the Dutch should be in the East Indies in the first place, in defiance of Portuguese claims to a monopoly on trade with the region, and whether the war should have been carried on between merchant ships far away from the main theatre of conflict.

At this point, the Dutch East India Company called on Hugo Grotius, a jurist, who was counsel to the Company and one of the few authorities on these issues, to justify the action and secure the retention of the captured cargo. In a commendable feat of intellectual gymnastics, Grotius chose to concentrate his attention not on the inconvenient circumstances of the case, but on a new general principle, which he called ‘the freedom of the seas’. This he outlined in a book, called Mare Liberum (The Free Sea), which comprehensively demolished the Portuguese – or any other state’s – claims to exclusive rights to trade at sea.

With a dramatic flourish, Grotius called in aid the ‘most [hitherto unknown] specific and unimpeachable axiom of the Law of Nations, called a primary rule or first principle, the spirit of which is self-evident and immutable’. The sea was not like the land, he claimed, but like the air: ‘it is not susceptible of occupation; and, second, its common use is destined for all men. For the same reasons, the sea is common to all, because it is so limitless that it cannot become a possession of any one, and because it is adapted for the use of all.’4

As a result, Grotius maintained, every nation was free to travel to every other nation, and to trade with it. As clear as day, it was a right according to natural law. Therefore, the Dutch were entirely justified in going to the Indies, trading with the locals and, by the way, keeping the loot from the Santa Catarina.

With an alternating cavalier and compliant approach to legal restraint at sea, England opposed the Dutch position and supported the existing restrictions imposed and implied since the Treaty of Tordesillas (even though the English had long repudiated the authority of the Pope). England’s own particular circumstances – which increasingly included seeing the Dutch as maritime rivals and worrying about English interests in the Americas – somewhat tempered its enthusiasm for upsetting the Spanish and Portuguese. In his 1635 work Mare Clausum (The Closed Sea), the English scholar John Selden tried to prove that the sea was in practice as capable of appropriation as land or territory.

However, after almost a century of dispute between England and its near neighbour and Protestant co-religionist, including three maritime trade wars, both countries settled on the principle of the freedom of the seas. A formula5 was agreed that only limited the sovereignty owing to a state to 3 nautical miles (nm) (5.6 km) offshore, the range at which a cannon could theoretically fire. It was implicit that maritime claims were only valid in practice to the extent that they could be enforced and rights protected, quite literally at gunpoint. Elsewhere, the ships of all countries could – in theory – undertake peaceful navigation and innocent passage.

Despite blatant breaches of this generous principle, especially in the blurred area between war and peace, which inconveniently complicated the rights of neutrals and the actions of belligerents, this generally agreed arrangement for international maritime practice persisted through to the twentieth century and survived two world wars and the Cold War. In more recent years, new international conventions have been introduced, as we will see, but the basic concept of freedom of the seas has prevailed.

SEA POWER AND EMPIRES

As long as public and private interests continued to coincide, investment in the sea proved both commercially profitable and politically popular. Those countries that had excess agricultural or industrial output could find ready markets for their goods, alongside those with the skills and daring at sea to turn a profit in the service of the state or on their own behalf. It was the accumulated national experience of securing free access to the sea, venturing capital and exploiting trade, transport and naval power that enabled the creation of empires and growing national wealth.

The British, for example, secure in their island home from the worst excesses of conflict in Europe, were able to seize opportunities to establish their maritime pre-eminence on trade. This ascent started at a time when it was believed that there were winners and losers in trading and that only one side could profit substantially from a transaction, the supplier or seller. Often, countries sought to assert monopolies, both in terms of access to markets and goods and in their intolerance of the goods imported from, and carried by, other states. This mercantilist approach led to a succession of wars and strategic friction between the major powers, with Britain throughout its early modern and modern history more or less continuously engaged in competitive trade wars and disputes over market access. Also evident from an early stage was the close connection between trade and armed force: ‘You should well know from experience that in Asia trade must be driven and maintained under the protection and favour of your own weapons, and that the weapons must be wielded from the profits gained from trade; so that trade cannot be maintained without war, nor war without trade.’6

In the early modern period, British sea power under the Tudor and Stuart monarchs had grown as a result of the country’s need to defend itself against hostile powers (notably Spain), the search for new markets for English goods and a determination to share in the trade and opportunities of an expanding world. In the reign of Elizabeth, both private and royal ships that were needed to defend in war could only be afforded if they were able to turn a profit and be put to good use in the intervals between bouts of fighting. In the absence of sufficient capacity on the part of Spain and Portugal to supply and service the needs of their new colonies in the Americas, this took the form of the provision of goods (manufactures and raw materials) and of what would now be called services, in the form of slaves and privateering.

At this stage, in the Atlantic Ocean, most trade was carried out by private merchant vessels (armed to a greater or lesser degree), with very little investment or interest by the state, except in the levying of tolls and customs dues. Sea power was primarily expressed by the actions of merchants and privateers. The state simply sanctioned them, financed them when it was advantageous to do so and taxed them; it also contracted their services in wartime. It protected them from the jealous attentions of other states and dealt with local problems as well, such as pirates and belligerent potentates, when they assumed a level of inconvenience greater than that with which commercial enterprises could cope. And it took out the competition whenever war or local circumstances allowed.

Trade at this time meant exploiting commercial gaps in the market and illicit opportunities where they could in the margins of the restrictions imposed, however imperfectly and unevenly enforced, by the Treaty of Tordesillas and by subsequent strictures about trade with the Americas in particular. Needless, to say, these were more honoured in the breach than in the observance, by both sides, until the Spanish attempted to enforce their trading monopoly against what were now considered Protestant heretics, as well as commercial interlopers. These measures, which included open fighting between English ships and the Spanish authorities, notably involving John Hawkins and Francis Drake, resulted in a period of unrestrained irregular warfare against Spanish interests in the Atlantic and the Americas. Whether it was piracy or entrepreneurial activity depends on your point of view.

The Elizabethans knew about globalisation.7 They thrilled at Drake’s exploits; they traded in goods from as far afield as Persia, India and the Moluccas. They had ambitious plans to develop the New World. The period culminated in Drake’s highly profitable sortie into the Pacific and his circumnavigation of the world between 1578 and 1580. The systematic attacks on Spanish shipping by numerous English freebooters and the support given to Dutch rebels by Elizabeth resulted in open warfare with Spain, and a succession of Armadas sent against England, the most famous of which in 1588 was defeated by English tactical shrewdness, superior technology (ships and guns) used in context and, perhaps more decisively, the geography of the English Channel and a ‘Protestant Wind’.

Military successes at sea served to defend the country and extend English commercial reach to North America, the West Indies, Muscovy and the Baltic, to Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) and into the Indian Ocean. This habit of success established the English in their own minds as a maritime nation. The significant trends of this period were the close alignment of the country’s commercial and military interests, a system of private financing and joint stock companies for commercial ventures and the recognition that the use of the global super highway needed warships to protect British activities. The navies established and maintained under Charles I and, more importantly, the Commonwealth, were built in response to a realisation that a standing, professional government-financed and operated fleet would be required to project military power in support of government policy and to protect British commercial and colonial interests, which were expanding rapidly in North America throughout the seventeenth century.

In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the technical improvements in ship design, the rigging of vessels and their armaments ensured the continued dominance of the Europeans at sea, increasing the speed, efficiency, agility and fighting power of ocean-going vessels. More precise navigational techniques and the production of more accurate specialist instruments, notably in the field of timekeeping, also enabled safer, more reliable transits of great distances in general and the calculation of longitude in particular.

In the century before the American Revolution of 1776–83, British sea power in all its forms had been deployed to support commercial and speculative ventures and to deal with the ambitions and hostility of European peer competitors. Major wars against the Dutch in the seventeenth century, the Spanish and French in the early years of the eighteenth century and the French in the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63 had resulted in not only control of Canada and India, but also the acquisition of a range of overseas bases, markets and possessions, mostly in the West Indies. This had allowed the expansion of British trade and the acquisition of an extensive trading and basing network, both across the Atlantic and to India. Trade was reinforced by naval power, the adroit apportionment of private investment and credit and government war expenditure, which stimulated exchange but relied on extensive public borrowing. Britain had also acquired a very substantial naval organisation and supporting infrastructure that benefited from the vastly improved productivity, technological sophistication and innovation made available through the Industrial Revolution. By this time, the idea of ‘Great’ Britain had become synonymous with its relationship with the sea, as typified by James Thomson’s ‘Rule Britannia’8 (set to music by Thomas Arne).

In 1783, Britain’s claims to empire and maritime supremacy suffered a serious setback with the loss of the thirteen North American colonies in the American War of Independence. On this occasion, Britain’s inability to dominate the sea everywhere, all the time, in the face of a coalition of forces that included the French, the Spanish and the Dutch, as well as more than 1,700 American privateers (who captured 2,283 ships), was decisive in its defeat. However, Britain generally continued to hold its own elsewhere, most notably in the hugely profitable islands of the Caribbean, and acquired settlements in New South Wales, Sierra Leone, Trinidad, Mauritius and the Cape Colony. It also exerted an increased control over Bengal, Madras and the Indian hinterland.

British enterprise, in terms of trading networks and naval power, provided the investment, ships, commercial impetus and migrants to hold these disparate possessions together. Like other European powers, although more successful, Britain had developed the ability to use the oceans as the means by which trading systems and military power could be used on a global scale. Empires on which the sun never set were crucially dependent on the free use of the sea as the basic connector. Rather like cyberspace, the sea was the vital gateway and enabler for a more interconnected world – an imperial web, if you like. Indeed, between 1760 and 1850, the British – and to a lesser extent the other European powers – were vital agents of globalisation, bringing together, through administrative and technological means, territories and new sources of economic growth, while circulating people, credit, goods, services and innovation between Europe and the networks of colonies and markets.

Despite these high levels of interchange and energy, the period of the Age of Sail cannot be seen as true globalisation, as it is commonly understood today. Goods carried needed to have a high value to weight ratio, without the threat of competition in the home countries, in order to justify the expenditure and risks involved in oceanic trade and travel – hence the attractions of spices, tea, silk and sugar. Intercontinental maritime trade was not yet a global free market; piracy, privateering, commerce and trade were all considered part of what was, in essence, an extension of the normal rivalry between states and dynasties for the accumulation of commodities and assets. States and companies acted on the basis of what they could get away with, relative to their commercial power and leveraged naval strength, both in overall terms and in numerous distant, remote parts of the world.

THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN GLOBALISATION

It would not be until the end of the long cycle of persistent warfare in 1815 that anything approaching the modern system would start to evolve. Once Britain had achieved superpower status on the back of its protected and privileged commerce and its naval strength, it made the world safe for free trade and abolished its navigation acts9 and other restrictive, mercantilist practices.

For Britain, the remainder of the nineteenth century was a period of unchallenged naval supremacy, in which the appearance of its warships was usually decisive in dominating a situation or resolving a crisis. The Royal Navy was instrumental in wringing concessions – sometimes at gunpoint – from China, in suppressing pirates and ending the slave trade from Africa to the Americas. In addition, the unrivalled and unchallenged access provided by the sea enabled Britain to extend the reach of its empire, exploit new markets and to apply pressure to recalcitrant or uncooperative regimes and potentates. Above all, it gave the leading industrial power a distinct competitive advantage in the ability to exchange goods on time and with the assurance of delivery, even in the face of instability or disorder in various parts of the world.

It is difficult to underplay the importance of the building of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the Panama Canal in 1914, both of which significantly improved the volume and speed of the global super highway. The Suez Canal expanded and exemplified Britain’s control of the super highway and its dominant industrial and trading power, by providing a fast, continuous route to its possessions and markets in Asia. The Panama Canal enabled the USA to integrate the economies of its east and west coasts and was a key stimulus for investment and exports. An indication of its breakthrough importance is that, by the time of the Great Depression of 1929, the USA accounted for 48 per cent of the world’s industrial output. Furthermore, the canal allowed the US Navy to operate as a single entity (not as two separate fleets, unable to support each other quickly) in the face of an overwhelming threat appearing in either the Atlantic or the Pacific. This ability to transit quickly between the east and west coasts was to become critical later, in the early years of the Second World War (that is to say in the period after Pearl Harbor), when America had to rush both ships and resources into the Pacific to contain Japanese expansion.

Britain’s empire had been built, and was reliant on, sea power to maintain its integrity and security. The crippling cost of victory in the First World War and its huge burden of war debt meant that Britain’s capacity to sustain the world’s largest navy shrank significantly. Under the ‘ten-year rule’ (the theory that major war was unlikely within a decade), provision for the Royal Navy, which in 1918–19 had been £356 million, dropped to £188 million in 1919–20 and just £52 million in 1923. Britain’s politicians had voluntarily surrendered its naval supremacy in the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, in a move both to contain the cost growth of its own navy and in an attempt to maintain a balance between the Royal Navy, the United States Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy (in particular, in the Asia-Pacific region. As a result of the 5:5:310 agreement, Britain could still project substantial power at sea in support of its empire and in the event of major conflict, but it could no longer prevail anywhere and everywhere against major regional powers, without the material and military assistance of its imperial partners and allies.

An indication of the inherent vulnerability and fragility that this situation produced was demonstrated when its relative, deployable power in the Asia-Pacific region was overwhelmed by Japanese naval capability in the Second World War. Just as German U-boats sought to disable British access to the super highway, both for trade and reinforcement (as they had attempted in the First World War), the Japanese severed Britain’s connectivity with the ocean, isolating and taking over the various territorial components of Britain’s empire in the Asia-Pacific region. It was reminiscent of what Britain had inflicted on the French for over three centuries. The lesson of maritime warfare, time and again, was that success or failure depended on the balance between opponents of relative, readily available combat power in the region in which belligerents are operating. It’s not what you have at home, but what you can bring to the party.

While the fortunes of Britain, and much of Europe, declined in the aftermath of the austerities and sheer effort required in the Second World War, for the USA, overwhelming victory in the war and the economic benefits that accrued from being both the arsenal and banker of democracy led to it becoming the pre-eminent superpower and champion of the free world. In addition, the threat of domination by an authoritarian state that had also achieved overwhelming victory in the same war, but not similar economic growth or access to nuclear weapons, meant that the USA was largely able to dictate the basis on which the free world would be sustained and run, in terms of strategy, recovery and economics.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed to link the countries of North America and Western Europe in opposition to the threat posed by the Soviet Union and its allies. NATO’s strategy was predicated on the use of the sea – not for nothing was it called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The peculiar geopolitical alignment of the alliance, involving the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean and Europe’s configuration as a peninsula – framed by the Mediterranean and Black Sea on its right flank and the Baltic on its left, with links to the Norwegian and the Barents seas – determined that the Alliance would adopt a maritime-based containment strategy with regard to its opponents.

In addition, there was a general acceptance that the credibility of NATO’s conventional strategy relied on the Central Front in Europe being held long enough to allow reinforcement across the Atlantic by the USA and Canada. This required the Soviet Northern Fleet either to be contained in its northern fastnesses in the Kola Peninsula and the Barents Sea or confronted by powerful battle groups in the Atlantic, able to punch through any Soviet warships or submarines that had been able to make their way into the Atlantic. The Far East, Black Sea and Baltic Sea fleets would be fixed in place locally. This would enable the resupply and reinforcement of western Europe to arrive in good time with suitable weight to throw back a Soviet assault and avoid recourse to nuclear weapons as part of strategies successively called, depending on how successful things had been, Mutually Assured Destruction or Flexible Response.

The US geographic position was critical in the struggle with the Soviet Union. It was able to deploy naval and air forces across the Pacific and Atlantic at will, while the fleets of its adversary were constrained in their freedom of manoeuvre by ice-bound ports for much of the year or the simple fact that America or its allies controlled the main routes and exit points through which the Soviet Navy had to pass. A dozen or so carrier battle groups and defence expenditure that varied in value between those of the next twenty and ten leading military countries together ensured that US supremacy at sea remained unassailable.

MODERN DEVELOPMENTS IN INTERNATIONAL MARITIME LAW

Since the end of the Cold War, the sea has been implicit rather than explicit in NATO’s strategy, as it has taken on expeditionary, coercive and peacekeeping roles that have involved the deployment of predominantly land forces to distant theatres of operation. The security of the sea lanes across the Atlantic has been largely taken for granted, in the absence of a threat to their integrity, as have the routes to and from NATO’s newer out-of-area commitments, such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Meanwhile, a large number of other countries have taken advantage of declining or containable threats to their land borders to invest in both hard and soft sea power.

Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, the changing scenery of international activity at sea meant that new regulations were needed to ensure the continued protection of the freedom of the seas. The British and the USA, in particular and in turn, had always been especially keen on upholding the idea, in association with their support of free trade. President Woodrow Wilson specifically championed ‘Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants’, as number two of his famous ‘14 Points’.11

During the Cold War, the US Navy was especially active in demonstrating its (and everyone else’s) right to conduct innocent passage in waters that were deemed by the Soviet Union to be its exclusive domain. This was despite Karl Marx’s 1861 doctrinal statement that, ‘The sea as a general highway of all nations cannot be under the sovereignty of any power.’12 Soviet and US warships frequently tried to ride each other off – playing brinkmanship to see who could gain the advantage within the international traffic regulations and who would back down in close quarters situations.

Nevertheless, by the late twentieth century, technological progress, security considerations and the broader interests of states resulted in adjustments to existing conventions. After several false starts, complex negotiations and extensive legal scrutiny, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) was drawn up as an international agreement that was finalised after its third phase of discussions in 1982, when it replaced four previous treaties. Abbreviated as UNCLOS III and in force from 1994, the 1982 Convention established a legal framework that governs the use of the sea. More importantly, it defined and codified the rights and responsibilities of states in relation to the sea, the environment and the management of marine natural resources.

All those countries that have ratified (162 and the European Union) the Convention are subject to its provisions. A number of countries have signed, but not ratified it, including the USA, whose Senate has not yet produced the two-thirds majority necessary for ratification. However, America does generally observe and adopt the principles on which the Convention is based. Indeed, in the modern era, along with the freedom of the seas, the USA, with mostly tacit support from its allies, has robustly asserted the principle of the sea as a ‘global commons’– the common heritage of mankind – enshrined in UNCLOS III and continues to do so.

Arbitration and dispute resolution have been provided over time by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but, since 1996, disputes arising out of the interpretation and application of the Convention have also been handled by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) in Hamburg. Nevertheless, the UN has no enforcement role in implementing the Convention or the judgments of these courts. Organisations such as the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the International Seabed Authority (ISA) have a share in some aspects of implementation, but the absence of a single implementation and enforcement authority limits the effectiveness of the Convention (for a discussion of global governance, see Chapter 7).

UNCLOS provisions