World seaborne trade has dramatically increased in line with the growth in the global trade of merchandise over the last two decades. The world merchant fleet has more than doubled since 2001, reaching 89,464 vessels with a total tonnage of 1.75 billion deadweight tons by January 2015. Around four fifths of total world merchandise trade is now seaborne (UNCTAD 2015, p. x). Securing sea lanes of communication is more than ever before vital to stability, economic growth, and development throughout the world. International order at sea is therefore an important, yet deceptively complicated concept. At first glance, it may mean little more than the nature and manner of what is done at sea as currently understood. Hence any major change, such as the rise of a new sea power which changes the relative status in the maritime pecking-order of the existing sea powers can be seen as impacting the current order of things. Or, again, the discovery of new undersea oil fields can change relative commercial priorities such that people find themselves to be in a new and rather different situation. On the other hand, the international order at sea can be threatened by âdisorderâ in the shape, say, of increased piracy, maritime terrorism, or some catastrophic weather event. In this book we examine how international order at sea is challenged, changed, and maintained and we focus on interaction and cooperation among leading, emerging, and smaller naval powers in order to maintain good order at sea.
Four vital and inter-connected attributes of the sea can be identified. These are the sea as a medium for the spread of ideas, as a medium for dominion and strategic maneuver, as a stock resource, and as a flow resourceâa means of transportation and exchange. The sea has certainly been an important medium for information and the spread of ideas, and people have gone to sea not just to spread information but to gain it as well. The urge to explore, to find out what was over the far horizon, and sometimes to reach a better place, has been part and parcel of mankindâs relationship with the sea. Maritime exploration was conducted partly in a spirit of high-minded scientific enquiry, and partly for commercial and strategic interest. Arguably because electronic means of communicating ideas are now so much faster, this historic attribute of the sea is significantly less important than it was (Friedman 2006), although the critical role of undersea cables and the continuing âunknown unknownsâ of the sea and its possibilities will compensate for this.
The worldâs leading naval writersâpeople like Alfred Thayer Mahan and Sir Julian Corbett, however tended to focus rather more on the sea as a medium for dominion. The fact that so many coastal communities were and indeed still are fortified, shows that the sea can be a source of vulnerability to marauders from afar, and at the same time a springboard for aggressive maritime endeavor. Historic experience demonstrates all too clearly that the sea is a strategic highroad, a medium by which one group of people can come to dominate the affairs of another. The Portuguese are an especially good example of what the Greeks call a âthalassocracyâ, an empire founded on mastery of the sea. The Portuguese first fought their way into distant geographic areas and then had to protect their investments there. Their soldiers were never sufficiently numerous to engage in major continental campaigns, so their 160 year empire in the Indian Ocean rested on a few garrisons in strategic places and on superior naval forces. When others, especially the Dutch and the English, began to accumulate greater levels of naval force, Portugal went into decline. For better or worse, the Europeans created new empires and changed the world. And they did it by sea. To make it all possible, they developed navies and naval strategy; a set of concepts of how to use naval force from which our understanding of all of the classic functions of sea power derive: Assuring sea control and thus being able to project power ashore in peace and war, to attack or defend trade directly and indirectly, and to maintain good order at sea. Although the Europeans provide perhaps the clearest example of the sea as a means of dominion, they are far from unique. Even the land-based Mongolians mustered naval fleets of several thousand shipsâthanks to their control of Chinese shipbuilding capabilities at the time, to invade Japan, Vietnam, and even Java (todayâs Indonesia) in their quest to conquer Asia in the thirteenth century (Delgado 2009, Stuart-Fox 2003). For such reasons, Alfred Thayer Mahan famously concluded that:
Control of the sea by maritime commerce and naval supremacy means predominant influence in the world⊠[and] is the chief among the merely material elements in the power and prosperity of nations. (Livezey 1981, pp. 281â281).
Sea power had this great historic effect because its control, conferred upon those nations able to exert it, such huge economic and strategic advantages that they would prosper in peace and prevail in war. These days, indeed, the interest in the sea as a medium of dominion appears to be a global one.
As a stock resource, the sea has been important from earliest Mesolithic times, and we still harvest some 20 per cent of our daily protein from the oceans. More recently, other marine resources, especially oil and gas, have become economically crucial. Indeed, demand for all these things shows definite signs of outstripping supply, increasing the competitive element in mankindâs exploitation of this attribute of the sea.
Finally, the relative safety and speed of the marine passage of goods and people by sea has made the sea crucial to human development, economically and socially, as a medium of transportation and exchange. This is as true now, as in the days of sail, or the dramatic new steamships that dominated global trade in the later nineteenth century. If anything, technology has made the connections tighter. The invention of the standardized container has further revolutionized the process. The result is a sea-based trading system that straddles the world and underpins the phenomenon of globalization which shapes the world order and helps determine its peace and security.
The rapid development of world seaborne trade has always depended on good order at sea. A relatively stable balance of power after the end of the Cold War, the strengthening of international regimes, and growing economic interdependence are often referred to as the three main factors explaining the era of globalization and economic prosperity, experienced since the end of the Cold War (Ikenberry 2000, Keohane 2005, Paul 2012). These same factors have of course had similar positive effects on international order at sea and spurred on by a shared interest in economic growth and global prosperity, countries have sought to enforce maritime security and effective maritime governance.
Accordingly, countries with a stake in the globalized sea-based trading system would seem to have a common interest in the preservation of good order at sea and in the littoral more generally, thus providing the optimum conditions for trade. From this arises an interest and purpose common to most nations, in the development and if necessary the defense of the system against anything which might be a threat âthreats which might range from extreme weather events at one end of the scale to an attack by states or groups hostile to the workings or the values of the system (Tangredi 2002). And indeed, Mahan reminded us that a global sea-based trading system is acutely vulnerable to such threats:
This, with the vast increase in rapidity of communication, has multiplied and strengthened the bonds knitting together the interests of nations to one another, till the whole now forms an articulated system not only of prodigious size and activity, but of excessive sensitiveness, unequalled in former ages. (Mahan 1902, p. 144).
In consequence he urged the establishment of a community of interests and righteous ideals to âdefend the systemâ (Mahan 1902, pp. 177â178). Dependence on sea-based transport can be a source of weakness as well as of strength and exemplifies, in Mahanâs words, the ââŠcommercial interest of the sea powers in the preservation of peaceâ (Mahan 1902, p. 99). While there is an assumption here that the resultant system is of universal good, there is also nonetheless, a competitive edge to globalization. The Manchester School argued that international trade was of mutual benefit, but they never said it would be of equal benefit. Accordingly, individual nations still have strong incentives to improve their place in the global system, relative to their neighbors. Hence, Sir Walter Raleighâs famous and much quoted observation:
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. (Platt 1989).
While these days few would express the point quite so bluntly, such ideas reinforce the view that decision makers need to keep their powder dry against the re-emergence, rather like Dracula when the sun goes down, of the older, bleaker, harsher world of traditional national rivalries and prospective conflict. Hence, good order at sea cannot and should not be taken for granted.
Challenges to International Order at Sea
Challenges to the established good order at sea can be identified by examining major changes in how the sea is used as a resource, as a medium for transportation, or as an area of dominion.
Changes in the constituents of sea power can have this effect too. In its provision of access to the sea and ports, or position close to strategic trading routes, geography shapes sea power (Mahan 1918/2008). Furthermore, a countryâs geostrategic context defines whether it has a maritime or a continental outlook and the will and need to develop naval capabilities and to become a sea power (Grygiel 2006, 2012). This may be influenced by external threat perceptions and the location of a countryâs economic center and political capital. St. Petersburg, for instance was built to transform Russia into a maritime nation, an example of a country changing its maritime geography through conscious policy. Another important characteristic and prerequisite of a sea power is technology and knowledge on shipbuilding, navigation and seafaring, both civil and military. Major relative changes in these indicators of sea power will also impact on the established order at sea.
Less dramatically perhaps, the rise in the relative importance in the global economy of the provision of financial and other services as opposed to the transport of manufactures or commodities brings with it the possibility of major change in activities at sea, as the successive global financial crises of 1997â1998 and 2008â2009 so graphically demonstrated.
It seems, then, that the current international order at sea is challenged in two main ways. First, top-down through structural changes as a result of global power shifts, changing threat perceptions, naval modernization, and changes in naval capabilities and an evolving interpretation and enforcement of the Law of the Sea. Second, international order at sea is challenged from the bottom-up through non-traditional security threats like piracy, terrorism, trafficking in WMD, unsustainable over-fishing, and environmental degradation. Piracy in the Gulf of Aden illustrates the interdependence between the onshore and offshore in the maintenance of order at sea. The same is the case for maritime terrorism and trafficking in WMD. The importance of access to fishery resources is clearly illustrated by the fact that China in recent years has built one of the largest distant-water fishing fleets in the world, operating in Africa, South America, and Antarctica (European Parliament 2012). We have in recent years also seen an increased need for maritime support for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR), with many of the largest disasters taking place in Asia. Structural challenges and geopolitical shifts as well as the more non-traditional bottom-up security challenges are enforcing new duties and tasks being given to marines all over the world in their effort to maintain good order at sea.
One major structural change in recent years have been the shifts in economic growth and global production and trade patterns away from traditional centers of growth to the South and to Asia in particular (Yoshihara and Holmes 2007). Developing countries now contribute larger shares of international seaborne trade. In 2014, they accounted for 60 per cent of global goods loaded and 61 per cent of goods unloaded (UNCTAD 2015, p. 12). This shift in economy, production, and world seaborne trade is also reflected in the ownership and operation of the world merchant fleet. Five of the seven biggest merchant fleets in the world are AsianâJapan, China, Singapore, the Republic of Korea, and Hong Kong (China) in order of decreasing tonnage, and together they account for 36 per cent of the world tonnage. China is now the largest ship-owning country in terms of vessel numbers and the third largest in terms of tonnage (UNCTAD 2015, p. 36). Among the top 20 container ship operators, 14 are from Asia, 5 from Europe (UNCTAD 2013, p. 44). The country with the highest LSCIâan indicator of each coastal countryâs access to the global liner shipping network, is China, followed by another four Asian economies, Singapore, Hong Kong (China), the Republic of Korea, and Malaysia (UNCTAD 2015, p. 39). 1 This structural change has contributed to the rapid growth in global trade and to unprecedented economic development in Asia.
This economic shift may not be regarded as a challenge to the established order at sea as long as we define âthe international order at seaâ as a condition that is only threatened by âdisorderâ in the shape of piracy or inter-state war and not by a major change in the relative order or importance of its chief constituents. However, alongside Asiaâs increased role in the global economy and world seaborne trade we also see an increase in the defense spending of Asian countries. In 2012, military budgets in Asia surpassed those of NATO European states for the first time (IISS 2013, p. 6). The five biggest arms importers in 2008â2012 were all in Asia, with India leading, followed by China, Pakistan, South Korea, and Singapore (SIPRI 2013). We are in fact witnessing a global power shift, from the United Stat...