Man is a terrestrial animal who lives on a planet 72% covered by seas and oceans. Any geopolitics is therefore also, if not even primarily, a geopolitics of marine space. There is indeed a globality of seas which all, with extremely rare exceptions, such as the Caspian or the defunct Aral Sea, communicate between
they. They are also the very foundation of globalization, since 90% of trade flows are by sea and 98% of Internet traffic passes through submarine cables. The control of sea lanes remains more than ever one of the foundations of power. The seas are also at the heart of an existential ecological challenge for humanity.
“These four contemporary issues – the strategic rivalry between great powers, the Asian shift in the maritime world, the acceleration of human influence on the seas and environmental threats – urgently call for the establishment of an authentic government of the seas », notes Maxence Brischoux, associate researcher at the Thucydide center at the University of Paris-Panthéon-Assas. In Geopolitics of the seas (PUF, 168 pages, 14 euros), a lively essay, it shows what the seas – and in particular the high seas – have specific to geopolitics, even though they are becoming more and more normalized with the extension of the exclusive economic zones belonging to the States and the exploitation of the seabed for hydrocarbons or the extraction of minerals.
Thalassocracies versus tellurocracies
At sea, outside territorial waters, there are no borders or real sovereignty. We can control straits, islands and major shipping lanes but not the sea itself and especially not the high seas which, as Maxence Brischoux reminds us, is “fundamentally one, indivisible and inappropriable”. The United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea, which entered into force in 1994, defines it as an area which cannot be the subject of any declaration of sovereignty.
The conflicts between the maritime powers, the thalassocracies, of which Athens was the archetype, and the terrestrial powers, the tellurocracies, like Sparta, punctuate the history of humanity, just like the oceanic seesaws. The centrality of the Mediterranean until the discovery of the Americas has been succeeded by that of the Atlantic and now the Pacific. But what does not vary is the importance of the sea, the freedom of navigation and the common good represented by its resources.
However, in the absence of a real world authority, how can their protection be ensured, if not by allocating areas to States while limiting their resource exploitation activities? “The safeguard of the seas would therefore imply the disappearance of their political specificity: they must pass from the reign of the unlimited to that of limits”, writes Maxence Brischoux, who recognizes that this perspective is not encouraging.
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