Securing Outer Space

International Relations Theory and the Politics of Space

Natalie Bormann, Michael Sheehan, Natalie Bormann, Michael Sheehan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781134044832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

The challenges that space poses for political theory are profound. Yet until now, the exploration and utilization of space has generally reflected – but not challenged – the political patterns and impulses which characterized twentieth-century politics and International Relations. This edited volume analyses a number of controversial policies, and contentious strategies which have promoted space activities under the rubric of exploration and innovation, militarization and weaponization, colonization and commercialization. It places these policies and strategies in broader theoretical perspective in two key ways. Firstly, it engages in a reading of the discourses of space activities: exposing their meaning-producing practices; uncovering the narratives which convey certain space strategies as desirable, inevitable and seamless. Secondly, the essays suggest ways of understanding, and critically engaging with, the effects of particular space policies.

The essays here seek to 'bring back space' into the realm of International Relations discourse, from which it has been largely removed, marginalized and silenced. The various chapters do this by highlighting how activities in outer space are always connected to earth-bound practices and performances of the every day. Securing Outer Space will be of great interest to students of space power, critical security studies and IR theory.

1 Unbundling sovereignty, territory and the state in outer space

Two approaches

Jill Stuart

As well as considering ongoing events in outer space politics (such as cooperation, militarization and commercialization), this text explores the ways in which we continue to evaluate and develop conceptual frameworks to help us understand outer space politics. This chapter furthers the engagement with how political ideas are reconceptualized in relation to outer space, and also how outer space has implications for our understanding of those political ideas. The ways in which we approach the study of outer space politics helps to construct the meanings by which it is imbued, and to suggest ways of developing our theoretical approaches.

One area in which outer space both challenges traditional political notions and also political and legal practice is in the definition and practice of sovereignty. This chapter argues that Westphalian sovereignty (also “modern” or “classical” sovereignty), which delineates a clear relationship between sovereignty, territory and the state, does not conceptually grasp sovereignty in outer space (and by a normative account, how sovereignty should and could be transforming). As such I argue that sovereignty has been “unbundled” in outer space, both practically through legal approaches which allow for a different relationship between sovereignty, territory and the state, and also theoretically in terms of leaving open the potential to reconceptualize sovereignty in a way that better embraces sovereignty in a globalized world (and indeed, going one step further, in a world where not all politics even occur within the “globe”, i.e. in outer space).

The challenge to traditional notions of sovereignty can be seen partly as a product of (and reconstitutive of) globalization, whereby transterritorial issues and the “shrinking” of the planet challenge the straightforward relationship between sovereignty, territory and the state.¹ The reality of space exploration can be seen as another radical and unique issue-area in which theoretical approaches to “global” politics must be reconceived. This chapter explores the ways in which outer space poses unique challenges to conceptual and legal approaches to governance. I also argue that there may also be a dialectical relationship between territorially-based politics and outer space politics, whereby notions of sovereignty are mutually reconstituting globalization and its conceptual challenge to classical notions of sovereignty.

There are several different practical and theoretical approaches to unbundling sovereignty in outer space. The two approaches used here are regime theory and cosmopolitan sovereignty. The approaches are very different – the first taking a practical and conservative but perhaps static and ahistorical view of the international system, to understand how territory is de-linked from sovereignty in the governance of outer space; and the second suggesting a fairly radical departure from Westphalian sovereignty, in delinking it from the state itself, and normatively repositioning “humanity” as the central unit of analysis in law. The chapter takes each approach in turn, applying it generally to outer space and then to a common example of the International Space Station (ISS), and then critiques the individual approaches. The final section of the chapter considers the two approaches in relation to each other, and draws three broad conclusions in relation to sovereignty, territory and the state in outer space: first, that understanding politics in the space age requires moving beyond Westphalian conceptualizations of sovereignty, and unbundling the relationship between sovereignty, territory and the state; second, that exploration of outer space itself may be contributing to a wider shift in the practice and understanding of sovereignty; and, third, that future developments in outer space exploration will continue to influence our conceptualization of sovereignty (perhaps further validating some approaches and undermining others).

Westphalian sovereignty

In 1648 the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia codified the nation-state as the highest level of governing authority, and established that individual states had the right to self-determination and non-intervention. This right to govern inside a specific territory, free from interference from outside, gave sovereigns rule over territorially fixed, defined and mutually exclusive geographical enclaves (Ruggie 1993: 151). While the evolution towards the territorial state had begun centuries before Westphalia,² the codification in Europe of territorial sovereignty marked an epochal break from previous systems of rule and organization of political space.³ The Westphalian state, with its clearly defined boundaries and individuation was conceived in physical, corporeal, atomistic and scientific terms, hence its association with modernity (Camilleri and Falk 1992: 237). The modern conception of the state is characterized by notions of territory as fixed by boundaries, under the rule of specific states, and guarded by both military defence and international laws and norms that legitimize the state as territorially fixed. Westphalia led to the conception of the modern state’s “impermeability”, “impenetrability” and “territoriality” (Hertz 1957: 474).

The nation-state has come to embody all institutions and relations associated with government (Held 1984: 70). This includes internal governance such as acting as the legitimate provider of legal and administrative institutions within the state’s clearly defined territories (Held 2002: 32; Camilleri and Falk 1992: 24). The state is also, by mainstream accounts in International Relations, the most important actor in world politics.

The definition of territory itself is not straightforward, and is worth unpacking. At its most basic, territory is an area of land or a portion of the Earth’s surface. This definition suffices in many discussions dealing with state boundaries and territory; however when it comes to areas of water, for example, the definition becomes less clear. In strictly practical and empirical terms, the high seas and air space are three-dimensional “spaces” subject to the exploitations of human activity, but they are not “fixed” (since water and air “moves”, and outer space is a “vacuum”). Terra firma means “solid land” such as continents and islands, but faces the same problem as above: humans have long exploited and explored spaces such as the high seas and air space, and hence legal and theoretical language is needed to consider the politics of non-terra firma (non-fixed territorial) spaces such as the oceans. Furthermore, some types of terra firma, such as Antarctica and celestial bodies, are technically “fixed” territory, but nonetheless fall outside traditional notions of territoriality as relates to the state.

The term “quasi territory” at first appears useful, in that it refers both to spaces which are subject to human activity but are not fixed territory, and also in that it has come to refer to terra firma that is beyond the jurisdiction by individual states. However quasi territory also sometimes refers to areas, such as offshore business locations, that are outside the domain of governance, international or otherwise. Yet outer space is subject to international regulation, but in a context not normally associated with traditional sovereignty.

Three legal clauses ultimately fulfil the linguistic needs for exploring the issue of outer space governance. First, “neutral territory” and, second, res communis (literally “thing of the community”) help to conceptualize areas that are of the public domain; open to all but also subject to group regulation. The third clause is “global commons”, which refers to areas that are inherently transterritorial in nature (Vogler 1995: 2), and in which members of the community (in this case, global citizens) have set rights to that area. This places the focus of the definition not on the nature of the “space”, but on the meaning with which the international community has infused that space.

The reality of these non-traditional spaces has been dealt with for centuries. The law of the seas was first codified in the early 1600s, most commonly associated with the writings of Hugo Grotius.⁴ In terms of practice, local commons have existed for centuries as shared areas. Thus the issues and legal language regarding neutral territory and the global commons are not new, but technological and political developments regularly change the way we conceive of, and act in, these spaces. In the last fifty years, in particular, issues of how we understand neutral territory have re-emerged with some urgency, as the law of the high seas has become refined, air travel has become widespread, the Treaty of Antarctica was negotiated, and outer space exploration has commenced.

Outer space is a global commons, and has been deemed res communis, belonging to all. As such it poses unique conceptual and governance challenges in a system traditionally rooted in territorial notions of sovereignty. While analogous legal and conceptual systems can be applied to outer space, based on precedents from, for example, the high seas,⁵ I argue that the concept of Westphalian sovereignty remains an awkward fit in regards to outer space politics. The relationship between sovereignty, territory and the state needs to be unbundled in regards to neutral territory in outer space.

Regime theory

Regime theory is one approach that allows for such an unbundling, in order to better understand outer space politics, and to take action for establishing governance over activities there. It would be a gross over-simplification to imply that there is any one single regime theory (Vogler 1995: 20), as in fact there are various methodological, definitional and even epistemological and ontological differences in the approaches of various regime theorists. However for the purposes of this chapter, and in order to establish a clear theoretical lens, I refer to mainstream rationalist regime theory, and to those areas within regime theory that most regime theorists have in common, and that are relevant to the analysis here. Regime theory is a relatively conservative approach, as it takes as a starting point the pre-existing mainstream interpretations of the international system, in terms of accepting state dominance in an anarchical system. That is, mainstream regime theory accepts the international system as constituted by states, and accepts that those states operate to maximize their positions within a system devoid of higher levels of governance. It assumes rational behaviour and calculations on the part of state actors, and thus presumes that agents acting in their own interest produce the system, and their analysis of those rational actors’ behaviour tends to be positivistic (Wilson and Evans 2002: 347).

While regime theory accepts states as dominant actors in the international system, and that states possess sovereignty over distinct territory, it also unbundles the relationship between sovereignty and territory by exploring how certain issue-areas that are inherently transnational (such as outer space) can come to be governed through regimes. The most widely accepted definition of a regime is as, “a set of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given area of international relations” (Krasner 1983: 2). Regime theorists seek to understand under what conditions states, as rational actors, will determine that it is in their interest to cooperate on issue areas such outer space governance, despite the lack of a hierarchical system of governance in world politics. In negotiating regimes, states rationally determine their interest and are then exerting their own sovereignty (albeit with varying degrees of authority based on their power position within the international system), by agreeing to rules and decision-making procedures for certain issue areas.

Regime theory and outer space politics

Regimes for outer space, codified in outer space treaties, have unbundled sovereignty by establishing sovereignty of states over their own objects in space, despite the fact that the objects are de-linked from a state’s terrestrial territory. Through established norms and principles, states have agreed to treat outer space as neutral territory, but also to treat human-made objects there as pieces of each state’s sovereign territory. In terms of establishing outer space as neutral, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 established that outer space is to be used for “Peaceful Purposes” (Preamble), that it is to be used for the “benefit of all peoples irrespective of the degree of their economic or scientific development” (Preamble), and that no nation-state may lay sovereign claim to a celestial body (Article II). By the time the Outer Space Treaty was ratified, outer space had also been accepted as “neutral territory”, as Sputnik and subsequent satellites were allowed to pass freely through outer space.

Responsibility for objects was, however, to remain with states, making objects in outer space enclaves of territory belonging to the launching state (Arnopoulos 1998: 205). The 1974 Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space requires objects launched into outer space to be registered via the UN with the “launching state”; the 1968 Treaty on the Rescue of Astronauts and Return of Objects Launched into Outer Space stipulates that, even once an object returns to earth, it remains the possession of the launching state; the 1972 Convention on Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects establishes that damage caused to a state’s object in space (or to its territory on Earth) due to crashes is owed compensation from the state responsible for the collision. Individual objects are subject to the launching state’s domestic legislation, and once in space they are treated as objects belonging to the launching state, in the setting of neutral territory (White 1998).

Nested within the major regimes established by treaties are further negotiated regimes, such as that established by the International Telecommunications Union to allocate bandwidths for satellite broadcasts and orbital slots, the regime to establish cooperation amongst Earth-monitoring satellites, and the regime for the International Space Station. In each of these cases, the negotiation of rules, norms, principles and decision-making procedures allow for the absolute individuation of Westphalian sovereignty to be overcome by providing a method for states to establish governance over areas that do not clearly fit the practical and conceptual Westphalian system. The combination of new technology, territorial uniqueness, inherent transnationalism of the issue area, and complexity due to multiple actors and interests, are all factors that converge to challenge traditional methods of governance based on Westphalian sovereignty. Outer space regimes serve to establish the notion of neutral territory and also the preservation of sovereignty over objects in outer space, and thus allow for the reshaping of political space (in outer space), with the unbundling of sovereignty that preserves state rule in a unique area.

Regime theory and the international space station

The way that regime theory unbundles the relationship between sovereignty and territory can be further exemplified through a closer analysis of the International Space Station. The Intergovernmental Agreements and Memorandums of Understanding⁶ negotiated for the ISS programme provide a unique system of governance that establishes rule over the “territory” of the station. As a way of re-creating “territory” in outer space, the regime gives responsibility over individual component parts of the station to the member partner that launched it (IGA Article 6). Liability for damage caused on Earth or to other space objects remains the responsibility of the launching state (Articles 2 and 3). Damage caused on the station would be waived by the states involved based on a cross-waiver of liability (Article 17). As such, the station is a sort of Franken-station, with its component parts physically connected and interdependent, but where those parts are ultimately sections of territory belonging to individual partners.

The ISS regime was led in its creation by a dominant actor (the US), based on that actor’s rational calculations of basic interests. Those interests included spreading the costs of the project, consolidating cooperation amongst the “free” (i.e. non Soviet-bloc) world, and projecting the US as a leader in space (see for example Sadeh 2004; Johnson-Freese 1990).

Less powerful states joined the programme for the relative benefits it would provide. The unbundling of sovereignty and territory on the station, outlined above, was a way to preserve strategic interests by keeping the station atomistic (by avoiding political interdependence through blending ownership). The regime itself did not challenge the sovereign decision-making abilities of the US, in that it maintained final say in decisions (in the initial IGA, prior to Russia joining; Article 7, IGA 1988).

Regime theory thus explains how individual actors negotiated a creative regime that allows for governance of, and understanding of, the technically and conceptually complex International Space Station. Despite being conceptually complex – as a multinational project, creating a physically interdependent object, in the neutral territory of outer space – actors used traditional approaches to sovereignty over territory for the station, in giving individual responsibility to each launching state. Yet that territory is of course de-linked from each state’s traditional territory, being placed in the vacuum of outer space.

Analysis of sovereignty within regime theory, in relation to outer space

Regime theory analysis of outer space politics preserves the relationship between the state and sovereignty, in that cooperation is understood to occur when states knowingly enter into regimes (albeit with varying degrees of absolute gains based on their success in negotiations, frequently determined by their power position within the international system). However these regimes themselves serve to unbundle territoriality by providing a way for sovereignty to exist outside of traditional state territories. Thus governance over inherently transterritorial or territorially complex issue-areas such as outer space is achieved.

The conservatism of analysing ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Unbundling sovereignty, territory and the state in outer space: two approaches
• 2 Space weapons: dream, nightmare or reality?
• 3 Critical astropolitics: the geopolitics of space control and the transformation of state sovereignty
• 4 The spaces between us: the gendered politics of outer space
• 5 The lost dimension? A spatial reading of US weaponisation of space
• 6 Haunted dreams: critical theory, technology and the militarization of space
• 7 The (power) politics of Space: the US astropolitical discourse on global dominance in the War on Terror
• 8 Between blind faith and deep skepticism: the “weaponization of space” and the Canadian debate on ballistic missile defense
• 9 The mice that soar: smaller states’ perspectives on space weaponization
• 10 Profaning the path to the sacred: the militarisation of the European space programme
• 11 Neo-realism and the Galileo and GPS negotiations
• 12 Poli Sci-Fi 101: lessons from science fiction television for global and outer space politics
• Bibliography