Environment and Planning I): Society and Space 1999, volume 17, pages 403 426

The maritime mystique: sustainable development, capital

mobility, and nostalgia in the world ocean
Philip E Steinberg
Department of Geography, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2190, USA;
e-mail: psteinbe@coss.fsu.edu
Received 30 January 1997; in revised form 28 October 1998
Abstract, Three images of ocean space are becoming increasingly prevalent in policy and planning
circles and popular culture: The image of the ocean as an empty void to be annihilated by hyper-
mobile capital; as a resource-rich but fragile space requiring rational management for sustainable
development; and as a source of consumable spectacles. In this paper I locate the emergence of these
three apparently contradictory images of the ocean within structural contradictions in the spatiality of
capitalism, which, in turn, are precipitating a crisis in marine regulation. To analyze these contradic-
tions, I begin with a historical study of industrial-era marine uses, regulations, and representations.
This is followed by an analysis of the present crisis and its associated representational discourses.
I conclude with a call for analyses of ocean space that probe beneath marine imagery so as to explore
the regulatory crises and social conflicts that underlie marine-policy debates and that reveal the ocean's
potential as a site of social transformation.
Introduction: Three images of ocean space
In December of 1994, the General Assembly of the United Nations designated 1998 the
International Year of the Ocean (United Nations General Assembly, 1994b), "providing]
a window of opportunity for governments, organizations and individuals to become
aware of the ocean situation and to consider the actions needed to undertake our
common responsibility to sustain the greatest common heritage we have and without
which we cannot exist" (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, 1997a). Build-
ing upon the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
(UNCED), the International Year of the Ocean (IYO)
(l)
was designed to place the
world ocean within the discourse of sustainable development, a discourse that others
have noted is devoted to the rational management of scarce resources so that nature can
continue to serve as a material base for capital accumulation well into the twenty-first
century (O'Connor, 1994). As the statement of objectives for the International Year of
the Ocean reads, in its entirety:
"The overall objective is to focus and reinforce the attention of the public, govern-
ments and decision makers at large on the importance of the oceans and the
marine environment as resources for sustainable development. The major aim of
the joint efforts during 1998 will be to create awareness and obtain commitments
from governments to take action, provide adequate resources and give the priority
to the ocean and coastal areas which they deserve as finite economical assets. This is
most important in view of the increasing threats of pollution, population pressure,
excessive fishing, coastal zone degradation and climate variability to the finite
(1)
The IYO and affiliated programs involve a host of United Nations agencies and private
foundations. Lead coordination is provided by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission
(IOC), a unit of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Official information on the IYO and related programs and agencies may be found at the web site,
http://ioc.unesco.org/iyo. Many of the public education activities associated with the IYO are being
coordinated by an organization called OCEAN98, a cooperative project of the IOC and the Water
Branch of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) (http://www.ocean98.org).
i
404
P E Steinberg
resource the ocean represents. Without a healthy ocean, the life-supporting system
of the earth would be seriously endangered" (Intergovernmental Oceanographic
Commission, 1997b; emphasis added).
An IYO planning document leaves little doubt about the overall orientation of the Year
of the Ocean toward what Esteva (1992) calls "the reign of scarcity": "Finite size must be
emphasized" in all IYO activities and publications (Intergovernmental Oceanographic
Commission, 1997a).
This application of the sustainable development discourse to the ocean at the inter-
governmental level has been supported by representations of the ocean in the popular
media. In 1995 alone, two major US publications, Time and National Geographic,
featured cover stories celebrating the ocean as a resource-rich but fragile environment
(Lemonick, 1995; Parfit, 1995). Time tells an optimistic story: The sea is a frontier replete
with opportunity, at last capable of being 'conquered'. National Geographic tells a more
pessimistic story: The sea is an endangered environment wherein new technologies both
respond to and reproduce scarcity (figure 1). Both stories, however, place the sea within
a discourse of sustainable development similar to that constructed by the promoters of
the IYO: As the sea is a space of "finite economical assets," the commodiflcation of its
environment should be guided by long-run planning for maximum efficiency and
productivity. Similarly, a 1998 supplement to The Economist celebrates the ocean as a
multiple-use space, but one in which certain uses are likely to crowd out others and
destroy the ocean environment unless we "take stewardship of the ocean, with all the
privileges and responsibilities that implies" (The Economist 1998, page 18). Also asso-
ciated with these efforts to promote investment in the sustained exploitation of the
ocean's riches is a general campaign for what Leddy (1996) calls the 'Cousteauization' of
Figure 1. National Geographic, 1995. The ocean is represented as a site rich with exploitable
resources but in need of rational management (reprinted by permission of the National Geographic
Society, Washington, DQ.
The maritime mystique 405
the oceans, a popular movement to cultivate public interest in the ocean's biota with the
effect of generating support for further marine research and for governmental and/or
corporate stewardship of marine resources, In the USA, perhaps the most visible
spokesperson for this movement has been publicist/authof/burcaucrat/oceanographcr
Sylvia Earle, supported by a marine research and development military-industrial
complex represented by individuals such as computer entrepreneur and former US
Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard and retired Admiral James Watkins, a
former US Chief of Naval Operations and US Secretary of Energy who presently heads
the Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education (Broad, 1997).
The rise of the sustainable development discourse, however, is only one component
of a multifacctcd shift in our perception, use, and regulation of ocean space. Even as
this image of the ocean as a space of resources has gained popularity, other images have
also been ascendant. Contrasting with the image of the ocean as a cornucopia of
exploitable resources, cultural products such as the film Waterworld and the television
program Sea Quest have depicted the sea as a distinctly resource-free space, an empty
surface across which and through which people move in search of adventure. In Water-
world (1995), for instance, the ocean is devoid of nature; the weather is always good, the
sea is always calm, and, with only one highly denaturalised exception, there is no
evidence of fish or other marine life. The sea docs not even provide the resource of
water; drinking water is obtained not by desalinating seawater but by purifying urine.
This Hollywood representation of the sea complements a corporate imagery in
which the sea is portrayed as an empty space across which capital flows with increasing
case as it seeks out profit-generating opportunities on land. Thus, the geocconomic
region known as the Pacific Rim is notable for its imagery of discrete, deccntered units
(nation - states, world cities, sweatshops, etc) revolving around a space of (marine)
emptiness: "The hegemonic construction of a Pascalian sublime whose 'circumference
is everywhere and center nowhere'... [characterized by] the dcterritorializing power of
oceanic vastness" (Wilson and Dirlik, 1995, page 1), "a perfect image for a centeredness
with no central power" (Connery, 1995, page 34; see also Dirlik, 1993). For the corporate
practitioner of capitalist globalization, the ocean that binds the rim (and, more generally,
the space of the world economy) is an unprofitable nuisance space to be progressively
annihilated by capital in its search for complete freedom of movement and the conquest
of distance. Corporate advertisements take this representation of the ocean to fantastic
excess; in a 1990 Merrill Lynch advertisement a panoramic photograph of the ocean is
accompanied by the caption, "For us, this doesn't exit" (reproduced in Roberts, 1996),
and in a 1997 advertisement the telecommunications firm Concert envisions a 'global
village' wherein the world has been impacted by a fortuitous act of tectonic convergence
in which the continents have been squeezed together, eliminating practically all inter-
vening ocean space (figure 2). AT&T similarly advertises its international service with a
slogan celebrating its ability to annihilate the marine divide: "Oceans separate. And we
connect" (cited in Carvajal, 1995).
Concurrent with these two images of the seathe ocean as a space of sustainable
development, and as a space of flows to be crossed and annihilated in pursuit of
investment sitesthere is a third image of the sea: the ocean as a site of past glory
and culture. This representation can be seen in the proliferation of harborside devel-
opments commemorating maritime history through festival marketplaces, high-income
housing, and maritime museums. From Boston and Baltimore, home of the prototypes
of these developments, to Cape Town, Sydney, and countless other sites, port-city urban
renewal projects feature maritime references (figure 3). This trend is complemented by
cities such as Bristol and Lisbon, which have recently celebrated their maritime
heritage through festivals and expositions oriented to tourists from around the world
406 P E Steinberg
Figure 2. Concert advertisement, 1997. A telecommunications firm idealizes the annihilation of
ocean space (reprinted by permission of Concert Communications Services, Reston, VA).
Figure 3. South Street Seaport, New York City. Historical maritime images provided an atmosphere
for retail commodity consumption (photograph by Emily Clark, New York).
The maritime mystique 407
(Atkinson et at, 1997; Atkinson and Laurier, 1998; DeFilippis, 1997; Goss, 1996; Kilian and
Dodson, 1995; 1996). More, the sea is referenced as a crucial source for folk culture and
past economic glory, but the role of the ocean in contemporary political economy is
reduced to that of a provider of images to be consumed: "The old harbor front, its links
to a common culture shattered by unemployment, is now reclaimed for a bourgeois
reverie on the mercantilist past" (Sekula, 1995, page 12),
Thus, we are presently encountering three images of ocean space that apparently
contradict each other: the ocean as a resource-rich (but fragile) arena for sustainable
development, as an (ideally) empty space facilitating friction-free movement of capital,
and as a space that is materially irrelevant but whose image provides 'historical'
grounding for postindustrial cities. These reflect the material agendas of competing
interest groups who invoke these images to support different systems for regulating the
marine environment, My aim in this paper is to make sense of these intensifying ways
in which we use and represent the world ocean and debate its regulation.
These different regulatory strategics are centrally related to the intensification of
a single tension within the spatial organization of society, the tension between
capital's contradictory needs for fixity in discrete locations and for mobility across
space. This tension has been discussed extensively with regard to land space, most
notably by Harvey (1982), but I seek to extend the analysis to the world ocean. Key to
this argument is that ocean space, like land space, is an integral component of society,
transformed amidst the dynamics of the world economy (Steinberg, 1998; 1999). The
social processes that shape the ocean arc linked to those that operate on land, but the
actual constructions that have emerged from these contradictions in ocean space have
been specific owing to the sea's unique physical properties, most significantly its
unsuitability for the placement of spatially fixed investments. In recent decades,
new opportunities have emerged for utilizing the sea, and the old order of the oceans
has proven insufficient for serving the needs of various ocean users. Thus, it is argued
below that the world ocean is presently undergoing a crisis of regulation. Ocean uses
associated with capital fixity and those associated with capital mobility are both
intensifying and spreading out across ocean space, to the point that the two groups
of uses increasingly overlap. Regulatory regimes and institutions that support one set
of uses are fundamentally incompatible with those that support the other set of uses.
The ocean has emerged as a site of conflict, as is reflected in the multiple images of
marine space outlined above.
To investigate this conflict and its bases in the dynamic spatiality of capitalism, I
explore how various capital interests have emerged over time to utilize ocean space and
construct competing marine regulatory regimes and representations. The remainder of
this paper consists of four parts. In the first part, I explore the foundations of the
industrial-era ocean space regime by tracing its origins from the days of mercantilism
through the present, and emphasize how transformations in the regime have paralleled
shifts in the spatiality of world capitalist organization. In the second part, I revisit the
latter part of this history, and concentrate on the sea as a space of emergent opportuni-
ties for placing spatially fixed investments. Also in this part I detail the present crisis in
ocean-space regulation that is resulting from the ocean's multiple functions. In partic-
ular, I focus on the contentious debate over manganese nodule mining that absorbed
much of the United Nations' deliberations over the Law of the Sea from the late 1960s
through the mid-1990s. In the third part, I return to the three images of the ocean
discussed in this introduction, and demonstrate how each reflects one or another
component of the present crisis in the regulation of ocean space. In the fourth part, I
conclude by asserting that these images divert attention from ongoing social conflicts
408 P E Steinberg
and from broader questions concerning the role of ocean space as an arena where
social power is expressed and contested.
The historical geography of ocean space: A tale of capital mobility
Modern-era representations and regulations of ocean space are particular to our society
and have their origins in underlying social structures and uses of the sea. As a point
of departure, modern regimes governing the ocean can be compared with those of
nonmodern societies (Steinberg, 1996b), ranging from the societies of Oceania, where
the sea was governed like land as an integral space of society (Jackson, 1995; Nakayama
and Ramp, 1974), to those of the Indian Ocean, where the sea was constructed as a zone
so external to land-based society that the ships of states warring on land ceased being
adversaries when they encountered one another at sea (Anand, 1983; Braudel, 1984;
Chaudhuri, 1985).
Set against this broad spectrum of possible systems for ocean governance, the event
usually heralded as the beginning of the modern ocean-space regimethe early seven-
teenth century 'Battle of the Books' between Grotius (1916) and Selden (1972)is
revealed as a relatively narrow debate wherein all parties argued for modifications of
preexisting European ocean-space traditions in an effort to craft a governance system
appropriate for the emergent era of merchant capitalism (Anand, 1983; Steinberg,
1996a, pages 186-200). Although Grotius and Selden are typically portrayed as polar
opposites, the former advocating freedom of the seas and the latter advocating enclo-
sure (see O'Connell, 1982, page 1 -14), both authors shared a common basis in the
legal principle of imperium that had guided Roman control of the Mediterranean
(Fenn, 1925; Gormley, 1963; Lobingier, 1935; O'Connell, 1982, pages 14-20). According
to this doctrine, the ocean is immune to incorporation within the territory of any
individual state, but, as an essential space of society, it is perceived as a legitimate
arena for exertions of power by land-based state entities.
This Early Modern ocean-space regime was particularly well suited to the spatiality
of the era's mercantilist political economy. On the one hand, the interstate political-
economic system was (and remains) dependent upon competition among multiple
sovereign states (Chase-Dunn, 1989; Wallerstein, 1984). The transformation of world
hegemony into one global world empire would have stifled the political competition
that drove (and continues to drive) capitalism's search for ever-increasing accumula-
tion. On the other hand, during this early era of capitalism there were few domains in
which sovereign states could actually compete with each other for economic domi-
nance. High-risk investments in the mainstays of mercantilist political economyover-
seas agriculture, mineral extraction, and the carriage tradegenerally would have run
at a loss if mediated solely by a 'depoliticized' free-enterprise market (Andrews, 1984;
Braudel, 1982; Davis, 1962) and there were few opportunities for profits to be realized
from investment in European production sites (Dunford and Perrons, 1983). However,
rising European powers soon discovered that by applying state violence they could
claim exclusive rights to the products of distant areas and gain monopolistic control
over long-distance trade routes, and this served as a crucial means for generating
capital accumulation (Chaudhuri, 1985; Davis, 1962; Nijman, 1994).
Analyzing these factors, Bunker and Ciccantell (1995; forthcoming) have suggested
that the one distinct characteristic of this early period of capitalism was that the
primary means for capital accumulation was control of trade, or channeled circulation,
and they have suggested that the era be renamed the age of transport capitalism. It
follows that in a system in which economic power was based upon controlling discrete
channels of trade, the surface upon which much of this trade was carried out (the
ocean) would emerge as a site for exercising power and implementing state violence.
The maritime mystique < ) < )
Thus, the control of trade routes rapidly became conflated with political domination
and military might, and the deep seas became constructed as a 'force-field' for exercis-
ing these forms of power (Mollat du Jourdin, 1993), and innovations in the means for
crossing its expanse were among the driving forces in modern technological progress
(HugilU 1993).
Even as the sea became an essential arena for the gathering and expression of
social power, nascent international law clearly placed the ocean outside the realm of
state territoriality. Incorporation of ocean space within the borders of the state could
interfere with its function as a circulation surface, and during this era circulation was
the dominant means by which states accumulated wealth. Thus, although the 1493 Papal
Bull and the 1494 Treaty of Tordcsillas are often described as dividing the seas between
Spain and Portugal (sec Gold, 1981, page 35; Grotius, 1916, pages 37-38), a careful
reading reveals that these documents were specifically worded to avoid any implication
that the seas were to be partitioned. Rather, each state was granted exclusive policing
powers in its respective region of the sea (Steinberg, 1996a, page 176- 183). By con-
structing the ocean as a space where states competed for influence and use, but not for
outright possession, the mercantilist-era ocean-space regime preserved both the inter-
state competition and the channeled circulation that were essential attributes of the era's
political-economic system.
With the Industrial Revolution of the mid-eighteenth century, the spatiality of
capitalism underwent a transformation, as did the social perception and regulation of
the sea. Although the dominant use of the seatransportation of commodities across its
surfaceremained constant with the previous era, its perceived significance in the
context of political economy changed markedly. At the root of this transformation in
political economy were a host of new opportunities for investing in land space. Following
from these opportunities, the industrial era's rationalist 'development discourse'justified
the reification of developable places and denigrated the spaces between. According to the
discourse, all societies were to 'develop' themselves by identifying what they produced
best and directing investment toward production of that good. Through the application
of reason to investment decisions, a society could progress (Sachs, 1992; Watts, 1993).
Development was to occur in 'territories'units of land space that could be bounded,
governed, planned for, and 'emptied'and 'filled'according to generalizablc rules of profit
maximization (Sack, 1986; Steinberg, 1994). The development of a placethrough the
rational application of spatially fixed investmentswas equated with enlightenment,
progress, and civilization.
Capital circulation remained an important aspect of political economy during this
era, but, at least in the popular imagination, fixity and development replaced it as the
essential activities of economic life. Gold's account of the lack of attention given to
trade at the Congress of Vienna (1815) exemplifies how, during the industrial era, little
formal attention was given to capital mobility, or, more specifically, to the ocean as a
space of capital circulation:
"For most European countries, commerce was no longer 'fashionable' nor something
on which great amounts of energy needed to be expended. Commerce was considered
to be sufficiently self-motivated and self-perpetuating that whatever loose regulation
it needed could be supplied by lesser government bodies. As long as commerce could
provide a convenient tax base for government ambitions, necessary employment for
the expanding population, and new markets for imports and exports, it was left to its
own devices. Ocean transportation, as a part of the commercial structure, fitted well
into this laissez-faire philosophy" (Gold, 1981, page 80).
Thus the ocean became discursively constructed as removed from society and the
terrestrial places of progress, civilization, and development. Movement across spaces
410 P E Steinberg
that resisted development, although necessary, was rhetorically defined as a subordinate
activity outside social organization. The ocean was to serve capitalism as an empty
space across which the free trade of liberal capitalist fantasy could transpire without
hindrance from natural or social obstacles. As an 'other' space, the ocean was con-
structed not so much as a space within which power could be deployed (as it had been
during the mercantilist era, when control of channeled circulation was an essential
component in garnering social power) but as an empty space across which power could
be projected (Latour, 1986; Law, 1986).<
2
>
Evidence of this abstraction of ocean space during the industrial era can be observed
in both the regulatory and representational spheres. When regulations were required for
certain maritime activities, such as shipping or piracy, policymakers continued the
mercantilist-era practice of avoiding territorial control by sovereign states. However,
unlike in the previous era, the sea was now also discursively constructed as a subordi-
nate arena beyond the social practice of formal interstate competition. In the case of
shipping, states largely abandoned global shipping regulation, leaving the industry to
govern itself and, in some cases, effectively giving national industry associations the
authority to negotiate international treaties (Gold, 1981). Recognizing shipping's
dependence on the maintenance of an indivisible ocean, hegemonic players developed
a series of regulations and institutions that reflected their diverse interests and their
desire for systemic stability rather than promoting regimes crudely calculated to multi-
ply their social power and maximize short-term accumulation of economic rents
(Cafruny, 1987).
A somewhat different route was taken with regard to piracy, but here too regulation
in ocean space was crafted so as to define the ocean as a space beyond state competi-
tion (Thomson, 1994). Ships not flying a national flagthat is, ships not claiming
allegiance and rootedness in one of the civilised 'places' of the landwere declared
to be of the wild, of the anticivilization of the sea. They were defined in international
law as hostis humani generis (the enemy of humankind), a designation that transcended
the division of land space into sovereign states and left pirate ships legitimate prey for
ships of all land-based 'civilized' nations. The axis of social power enabling regulation
of piracy in ocean space was thus scripted as a 'free-for-all' between the forces of land
space and ocean space rather than a structured, intrasystemic competition among land
powers seeking riches from assertions of social power in the sea.
In representation, there was similarly a complex set of continuities and disconti-
nuities with the mercantilist era. In general, the significance of marine space was
diminished; once perceived as an arena for one of the economy's essential activities
(the movement of goods across space), the ocean was now reduced to an in-between
space that separated the terrestrial places of development. This shift in perception of
the ocean can be observed in its representation on navigational charts and other maps
of the era. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, maps portrayed an ocean
cluttered with ships, sea monsters, and rhumb lines, all of which were intended to
portray the complex 'reality' of a space rich with natural and social features. By the
early eighteenth century, however, the ocean was perceived as a space unworthy of social
(2)
In an apparent exception to this trend, military rhetoric during this period continued to portray
the ocean as a contested force field in which military power was extended (see, for example,
Mahan, 1890). However, studies of the British and US navies during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries reveal that, this rhetoric notwithstanding, their energies were directed not toward control
of the sea (nor of channeled circulation on its surface) but rather toward projection of power
across its expanse to distant land space (Baer, 1994; Bartlett, 1963; Kennedy, 1976; Stevens and
Wescott, 1942). It was only in 1992 that the United States Navy formally acknowledged that its
primary mission was the projection of power from the sea rather than its deployment in the sea
(United States Navy, 1992).
The maritime mystique 411
interest (Whitfield, 1996), Cartographers reduced the ocean to an empty, blue expanse, at
most punctuated by placeless latitude and longitude coordinates and oftenas in Lewis
Carroll's parodyas "a perfect and absolute blank" (Carroll, 1973, page 115).
Although this representation of the ocean as empty and featureless dominated the era,
there was an alternate, romantic representation as well. As a component of their search for
alternatives to modern terrestrial society, nineteenth and twentieth century romantics
seized upon the sea as a space beyond social norms and celebrated it for having a nature
incapable of being tamed by the forces of modernity. Despite their contrasting depiction
of the nature of ocean space, the romantics' representation also had its origins in the
industrial era's construction of the sea as a space beyond society. The romantics, like the
drafters of the antipiracy codes, identified the sea as a wild *other' but they honored it as a
space to be respected and, in some instances, idealized rather than vilified.
This romantic perspective on ocean space is particularly evident in marine art and
literature of the era. Whereas earlier marine artists had concentrated on detailed portraits
of ships, elements of civilization that happened to reside in ocean space, nineteenth-
century romantics such as Winslow Homer and J M W Turner turned their attention
away from ships and toward the ocean itself, portraying the marine world as a space of
brilliant hues and sublime terror that contrasted with the tamed spaces of civilization
(Cordingly, 1973; Gaunt, 1975). In literature, as well, the sea came to be represented as the
antithesis of modern, developable land space, as a romantic space of prcmodcrn Christian
morality (see, for example, Samuel Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner), or mon-
archical hierarchy (several of Joseph Conrad's novels), or anarchic escape (Jules Verne's
20000 Leagues Under the Sea) (Raban, 1992). Responding to and reproducing these
representations, urbanites began to vacation at seaside resorts where the proximity of the
marine wild suggested escape from the moral codes of modern civilization (Corbin, 1994;
Urry, 1990).
The resurgence of capital fixity and the contemporary crisis in ocean-space governance
Any history of the ocean told simply as a narrative of changes in the social regulation
of capital mobility is necessarily partial. Capitalism does not survive simply by moving
capital about; it also must continually find (or invent) locations for placing fixed
investments (Harvey, 1982), and the sea has not been insulated from this half of
capitalism's spatial dialectic any more than it has been insulated from mobility. As
the sea emerged as an arena for locating spatially fixed capital investments, a series of
marine regulatory innovations were implemented. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) these
regulations, conflicts arose between aspects of the ocean-space regime facilitating capital
mobility and those facilitating capital fixity, which precipitated the marine regulatory
crisis of the late twentieth century.
Until recently, opportunities for generating profits from the extraction of resources
at discrete points in ocean space occurred, with few exceptions, in coastal waters. In
order to cope with increasingly intense use of coastal waters as a source of living and
nonliving resources and with increasingly intense use of the deep seas as transportation
space through which the movement of commodities could facilitate capital accumula-
tion, a corpus of international law developed that divided the oceans into two distinct
regions. Already by 1840 jurists had developed a clear legal distinction between coastal
and noncoastal waters (Anand, 1983, page 137; O'Connell, 1982, pages 1920) and by
1900 the coastal zone was indisputably recognized as a component of the sovereign terri-
tory of the nation-state (O'Connell, 1982, pages 60-298). These juridical innovations
enabled states to provide whatever territorial control was deemed necessary to regulate
the rational implementation of development initiatives and guarantee the security of
spatially fixed investments in discrete coastal sites where fishing and mineral extraction
412 P E Steinberg
activities were being undertaken. In the few instances where regulations were needed for
resource extraction in the deep seas, multilateral, and usually species-specific, con-
ventions were adopted (Colombos, 1967, pages 401-423). Although these noncoastal
conventions often referred to specific regions of the ocean, they never contained the exclu-
sionary or enforcement provisions that Sack (1986) identifies as essential components of
territorial control and that would be required before investors could be guaranteed the
right to collect on spatially immobile investments.
Thus, the industrial capitalist-era ocean-space regime sought to facilitate both of
capitalism's contradictory spatial tendenciesthe tendency toward movement (which
is facilitated by the absence of social barriers) and the tendency toward fixity (which is
facilitated by territorial regulation). To support both tendencies, a 'spatial fix' of a sort
was implemented. The oceans were geographically partitioned: the deep seas were
constructed as an asocial nature-less void within which capital could move without
hindrance, whereas a narrow coastal zone was designated as a site of fixity and devel-
opment wherein the territorial state could protect investments and restrict access.
Like the terrestrial 'spatial fix' discussed by Harvey (1982) and Smith (1990), the
one implemented in the ocean during this era merely covered underlying contradictions.
Cracks in the dual-zone regime began to emerge as early as 1930, when participants at
the League of Nations Conference for the Codification of International Law were
unable to develop a standard definition for the breadth of the coastal zone (Anand,
1983, page 141). Additionally, around this same time, advances in fishing technology
made the exhaustion of deep-sea fish stocks a real possibility. The 1930s witnessed a
number of fishing disputes, in particular between the United States and Japan over
North Atlantic salmon fisheries (Anand, 1983, pages 162-163; Gold, 1981, page 248;
Watt, 1979). Heavily capitalized, distant-water fishing fleets began to threaten the
combination of a minimalist 'high seas' regime and nonbinding multilateral production
limitations that had previously governed deep-sea fishing.
Concurrently, in 1937, the first commercial off-shore oil well was sunk in five
meters of water, two kilometers off the coast of Louisiana. Within a few years, offshore
drilling technology had advanced to the point where petroleum extraction could be
undertaken in depths far greater than five meters and in waters beyond the limit of
three nautical-miles (5.5 kilometers) which at the time was accepted by most countries
as the outer boundary of territorial waters (Gold, 1981, page 251). This opportunity for
spatially fixed investments outside the narrow coastal zone posed an additional threat
to the strict dichotomy between land-like territorial waters and nonterritorial deep seas.
These contradictions in the industrial capitalist-era ocean-space regime intensified
after the Second World War. The United States, in part responding to difficulties that it
had encountered obtaining petroleum during the war, issued the Truman Proclama-
tions of 1945 (United States, 1945a; 1945b). With these statements, the USA claimed
limited national rights to living resources in the waters above the continental shelf
adjacent to the US coastline and to the shelf's mineral resources (Watt, 1979). Follow-
ing these proclamations, several other countries, primarily in Latin America, declared
rights to waters beyond the three-nautical mile limit that had previously prevailed.
These declarations ranged from ones that, like the USA, implied exclusive resource
rights but not full inclusion within the sovereign territory of the state, to more extreme
claims, such as that of El Salvador, which wrote into its Constitution of 1950, "The
territory of the Republic ... includes the adjacent seas to a distance of 200 sea miles
from low water line and the corresponding airspace, subsoil and continental shelf"
(cited in Extavour, 1979).
Following these increasingly expansive territorial claims, the international com-
munity sought a compromise that would retain the previous 'spatial fix' dividing the
The maritime mystique 413
sea into a territorially governed coastal zone for fixed investment and resource extraction
and a non-tcrritorially governed deep sea dedicated to facilitating capilal circulation.
Attempts at the First and Second United Nations Conferences on the Law of the Sea,
held in 1958 and I960, were unsuccessful, but eventually a compromise was reached at the
Third Conference (UNCLOS III) (1973 -1982). The Convention on the Law of the Sea
established at UNCLOS III set a limit of 12 nautical miles to the breadth of territorial
waters and established national Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) in waters between 12
and 200 nautical miles from a state's coast, or out to the limits of the continental shelf
(United Nations, 1982). To ensure that this creeping enclosure movement would not
interfere with the ocean's function as a surface for the movement of capital, the 1982
Convention held that high seas freedoms of navigation would apply both in the EEZs and
in any international strait fewer than 24 nautical miles wide and therefore lying entirely
within territorial waters.
Notwithstanding the compromise reached at UNCLOS III, it seems unlikely that
this latest iteration of the industrial capitalist dual-zone regulatory regime will be more
durable than any of its predecessors. Even before ratification of the 1982 Law of the
Sea was complete, the United Nations was convening a Conference on the Conserva-
tion and Management of Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks,
where some states were proposing the establishment of a framework for managing
select areas of the sea outside EEZs in order to prevent dcepwater fishing states from
taking more than their 'fair share' of fish species that migrated among EEZs or
between an EEZ and the high seas (Armas Pfirter, 1995; Orrcgo Vicuna, 1993). In
response to such conflicts, ocean-policy professionals have promoted a number of
further modifications of the existing regime. They advocate that specific uses and
resources of the world ocean beyond the EEZs (but not the waters themselves) should
be governed by a system granting management rights to individual adjacent coastal
states (Ball, 1996), by a system giving authority over uses of regional seas to councils of
regional states (Juda and Burroughs, 1990), or by a proliferation of nonspatial single-
use single-species conventions (Friedheim, 1993). Each of these proposals represents a
further attempt to facilitate governance of ocean resources while preserving the essen-
tial character of the deep sea as a friction-free transportation surface immune from
state territoriality.
The prospects for these variations on the traditional 'spatial fix' do not appear
good. Even if opportunities for fixed investments fail to emerge in the deep seas, it
remains questionable whether these nonterritorial regimes will be able to mediate the
ever-expanding number of potentially competing demands made on ocean space and
its resources (Couper, 1989). And, if a deep-sea ocean use were to emerge requiring
stationary investments, it is doubtful that any of these regimes would provide the
security of tenure necessary for investor confidence.
Beyond this dual-regime 'spatial fix' two other 'fixes' have been proposed. These solu-
tions might more appropriately be termed 'social fixes'; although they would constitute
changes in ordering space, they also would mandate substantial social change, and thus
disturb the global political-economic system. The first of these options has been termed
the 'national lakes' approach, in which each state's territorial waters would be expanded
until it abutted the waters of another state, eliminating any 'commons' in between. The
US State Department has projected what such a map of the world might look like, and
Zacher and McConnell (1990) have calculated thatgiven the relative strengths and
interests of various state actors in international competitionthis is not an inconceivable
scenario. Nonetheless, it would directly contradict the current 'great void'construction of
the deep sea and could potentially establish major obstacles to the relatively friction-
free maritime transportation of commodities on which so much of the world economy
414 P E Steinberg
is dependent. Indeed, since the Second World War, each time the USA has taken a
strong interest in intensifying ocean governance at the global scale or in the areas
adjacent to its territorial waters, it has taken pains to distance itself from proposals
supporting increased territorial enclosure that might endanger the high seas shipping
and military regimes that underpin US hegemony (Baer, 1994; Cafruny, 1987; Sullivan,
1985).<
3
>
The second social fix proposed by the world community has been the 'common
heritage' option. This proposal emerged in the 1960s, when it became likely that man-
ganese nodulesdeposits of manganese, nickel, cobalt, and copper lying on the ocean
floor beyond the continental shelfwould soon become a commercially viable
source of minerals. Mining the nodules would involve huge investments in large discrete
areas of the ocean floor. By most estimates, prior to mining, an enterprise would have to
prospect a site at least 30000 km
2
in area and then spend up to two billion dollars
custom-designing mining and processing equipment for the minerals of that specific site
(United Nations, 1987; 1989). It was recognized that enterprises, whether state-run or
private, would require some sort of territorial governance system before 'sinking' this
magnitude of capital in a portion of the ocean, but the world's powers were loathe to
sanction any system that might imply the beginning of national enclosure of the deep seas.
As an alternative, the United States suggested in 1966 that the seabed and its resources be
declared "the legacy of all human beings" (Johnson, 1966, page 930), a phrase that was
reworded as "the common heritage of all mankind" when Ambassador Arvid Pardo of
Malta formally proposed this designation at the meeting of the UN General Assembly the
following year (Pardo, 1967, page 1). Shortly thereafter, UNCLOS III began meeting to
consideramong other issuesa proposal for seabed mining to be carried out under a
UN-administered permitting system, with a percentage of revenues returned to the
United Nations for global distribution to developing countries and/or to mineral-
producing states likely to lose revenues owing to competition from enterprises operating
in global space.
Third World states, recognizing the symbolic value of a commodifiable resource for
the first time being designated as global property, proposed that the seabed be an
opening wedge for the New International Economic Order (NIEO) (Pardo and Borgese,
1975). Lauding the radical nature of this initiative, Robles notes,
"For its advocates, the introduction of the common heritage principle ... offered the
opportunity to transform not only the traditional law of the sea but also the tradi-
tional international law deemed inadequate to meet the needs of the majority of
states and of humanity" (Robles, 1996, page 70).
To translate this 'common heritage' principle into a vehicle for social change, Third
World negotiators proposed that production from the international seabed be carried
out by a UN production company, operating in a globally governed territory, with
technology and (at least initially) capital provided by the developed states. This pro-
posal fundamentally challenged capitalist assertions of the sanctity of production by
competitive entities, mediated only by the system of multiple sovereign states that
territorially governed the spaces of production. Despite reservations about the anti-
capitalist nature of this proposal, the USA and its allies (as well as the Soviet Union)
were eager to codify other components of the Law of the Seanamely, provisions
(3)
The 'national lakes' scenario would be plausible if the sea's transportation functions were
shifted to other domains (namely inner- and outer-atmospheric airspace). In this case, the sea
could increasingly become land-like, capable of being possessed, governed, and exploited under
the protection of sovereign territorial states. This development remains hypothetically possible,
but improbable given current technologies and transportation price differentials that favor move-
ment by sea over airborne transport.
The maritime mystique 415
limiting territorial sens to 12 nautical miles and guaranteeing free transit through
international straits (Comptroller General 1975)and so they agreed to it compromise
proposal whereby mining was to be carried out in some areas by private and state
firms in spaces permitted to them by the UN' s International Seabed Authority and in
other areas by the Authority's own production company (Frckihcim, 1993; Sanger,
1987; Van Dyke, 1985).
As events transpired, this innovative regime never came to fruition, By the time the
Convention was ready for signature in 1982, metal prices had dropped, thus diminishing
interest in commercial mining of the nodules (Shusterich, 1982). Also, the accession of the
Reagan and Thatcher administrations heightened the West's opposition to any regime
that challenged the sanctity of frcc-cntcrprisc capitalism (Burke and Brokaw, 1983;
Goldwin, 1983). The United States and many of its allies refused to sign the Convention
and further research on seabed mining came to a near standstill. By 1994, when the
Convention received its sixtieth ratification and was about to become international law,
conditions had changed further. Metal prices remained low, and the end of the Cold War
resulted in the NIEO losing an important (if sometimes lukewarm) proponent in the
Soviet Union. Geopolitical changes also intensified the US Navy's concern with achiev-
ing universal ratification of the Convention so as to guarantee high seas freedoms
(Galdorisi, 1995a; 1995b; Schachtc, 1993). Additionally, similar metal concentrations
were discovered inside EEZs, where they could be mined at less expense and without the
institution of the controversial UN regime (Paul, 1985). Last, it was revealed that nodule
claims made in the 1970s by the US research ship Glomar Explorer had been inflated
for the public to justify its presence in the Pacific Ocean where it was, in fact, attempt-
ing to raise a sunken Soviet submarine (Broad, 1997; also personal communication,
C Higginson, 21 May 1994). With diminished interest in achieving a functioning seabed
mining regime or in making an anticapitalist or procapitalist statement, and with greater
interest in achieving a universally accepted Law of the Sea, all parties agreed to move
beyond the seabed issue. In the end, the seabed mining provisions were modified by an
Implementation Agreement (United Nations General Assembly, 1994a) that essentially
reduced the International Seabed Authority to a permitting organization and that
introduced into the Law of the Sea "free market principles ... which are fundamentally
at variance with the common heritage principle" (Robles, 1996, page 70).
Should metal prices rise, however, it remains questionable whether a license from the
authority, a body lacking the sovereign territorial power of a state, would provide enough
security of tenure to attract the huge quantities of high-risk capital needed before
commercial mining could commence. This issue was generally avoided during the United
Nations negotiations as mining interests argued in principle for a regulatory system with
minimal intervention, but statements made by mining executives suggest the possibility
that no license from a nonstate authority would be sufficient to mollify the concerns of
financiers (Brewer, 1985; Shusterich, 1982; Takeuchi, 1979; Welling, 1985). In the case of
UNCLOS Ill' s seabed mining debate, the contradiction of capitalist spatiality in the
ocean was temporarily resolved because the seabed lost its attraction as a site of fixed
investment. But it is only a matter of time before a new ocean use requiring spatially fixed
investments (or a resurgence of interest in manganese nodules) reopens this conflict
(Earney, 1990).
This review of proposed solutions for reregulating ocean space reveals the severity
of the contradiction when the same space is both increasingly important as a dedicated
space of capital mobility and increasingly attractive as a site for intensive and spatially
fixed capital investment. The first ocean space reregulation option consideredan
adjustment of the industrial capitalist-era dual-zone spatial fixwould be unlikely to
416 P E Steinberg
provide long-term solutions to this crisis of regulation. The latter two optionsthe
social fixeswould be disruptive to capitalism as we know it. As Chase-Dunn notes:
"There are two main characteristics of the interstate system which need to be sustained
[if the capitalist world economy is to survive]: the division of sovereignty in the core
(interimperal rivalry) and the maintenance of a network of exchange among the
states" (Chase-Dunn, 1989, page 150).
One social fixthe national lakes option dividing the world oceanwould challenge
the second of these two prerequisites as the elimination of an ocean commons would
potentially interfere with capitalist free trade. The other social fixthe common heritage
option communalizing the world oceanwould challenge Chase-Dunn's interimperial
rivalry prerequisite (and possibly the free-trade requirement as well). And yet, despite its
incompatibility with capitalist processes, the world's powers have seriously considered
adopting the common heritage option. This suggests that when dual tendencies toward
capital mobility and capital fixity bear down on an area of space traditionally reserved for
mobility and rhetorically constructed as empty and 'outside' the system, the crisis of
regulation is severe.
Ocean imagery reconsidered
We are now in a position to revisit the three marine images with which this paper
began: the ocean as a space progressively annihilated by capital in its conquest of
distance, as a space of historical memory (and consumable icons) for postindustrial
society, and as a space of sustainable development. Each of these images represents an
attempt by capital to cope with the increasing use of the ocean as an arena for both
capital mobility and capital fixity.
The ocean as annihilated space
Regarding the first of these images, many scholars have noted the important role that
speed and the conquest of distance play in contemporary capitalism. Even those who
caution that this phenomenon masks the continued importance of place (for example,
Cox, 1997) or continuity with past political-economic processes (for example, Harvey,
1989) acknowledge that the ability to transgress space with unprecedented speed and
agility is a defining feature of today's capitalist political economy. Within this system of
hypermobile capitalism, the ocean has taken on special importance as a seemingly
friction-free surface across which capital can move without hindrance:
"Water is capital's element The bourgeois idealization of sea power and ocean-
borne commerce has been central to the mythology of capital, which has struggled
to free itself from the earth just as the bourgeoisie struggled to free itself from
tilling the soil. Moving capital is liquid capital, and without movement, capital is a
mere Oriental hoard .... [The ocean] is capital's favored myth-element" (Connery,
1995, pages 40, 56).
There are several layers of irony here. If capital were truly able to transcend the
barriers to seamless mobility imposed by the distance and nature of ocean space, then,
at the point at which this transcendence were achieved, the ocean could no longer have
utility. Although the ocean may be "capital's favored myth-element," its utility to
capital as a transportation surface lies in the ease with which it can be annihilated.
As we have seen, the ocean's service in a world of capital fluidity lies in the apparent
ability of corporations such as Merrill Lynch, Concert, and AT&T to wish away both
its nature and the very space it occupies.
The underlying utility of the ocean as an antithetical space of movement (and the
irony in capital's desire to annihilate it) is supported by Deleuze and Guatarri's iden-
tification of the ocean as "a smooth space par excellence" (Deleuze and Guatarri, 1988,
I ho maritime mystique 417
page 479). As sites of alterity, 'smooth' spaces serve as necessary counterpoints to the
'striated' spaces of capital whose physical and social features and points of friction
enable investment, sedentari/ation, enclosure, surveillance, and other processes asso-
ciated with modern life (Deleuze and Guatarri, 1988, pages 474 500). Despite their
utility, agents of capital progressively seek to absorb and 'modernize' these \smoolh'
spaces because they are resistant to essential capitalist categories and institutions. Thus,
the tendency to annihilate the formal independence o\^ ocean space is indicative of a
more general tendency toward self-destruction, whether this annihilation is achieved
through colonization by modernist institutions of navigation and militarism (as is depicted
by Virilio, 1986, pages 37 49, as well as Deleuze and Guatarri) or through physical
obliteration (as is idealized by Merrill Lynch and Concert).
Additionally, the intervening distance of ocean space amplifies difference, and, as poli-
tical economists have long asserted, the ability to shift capital between 'different' places
provides a crucial mechanism for capital accumulation (Hilferding, 1981; Lenin, 1939;
Luxemburg, 1964). Capital's perverse desire to annihilate its "favored myth-element"
although perhaps rational from a short-run profit-maximization standpoint runs the
risk of also annihilating opportunities for the realization of value through movement,
thereby reducing capital to the status of "a mere Oriental hoard."
Last, this capitalist fantasy of annihilating ocean space is ironic because, despite its
representation during the industrial capitalist era as a friction-free void, the ocean may
in fact be the portion of the earth's surface least amenable to time space compression.
Eurodollars move from New York to Tokyo in fractions of seconds, but hydrodynamics
limit the speed of the ocean freighters that carry the bulk of the world's commodities to
the same speed as at the end of the First World War (Sekula, 1995, page 50). Sckula
elaborates on this characteristic of the ocean in his discussion of transoceanic labor Hows:
"Acceleration is not absolute ... A society of accelerated Hows is also in certain key
aspects a society of deliberately slow movement. Consider, as a revealing case, the
glacial caution with which contraband human cargo moves. Chinese immigrant-
smuggling ships can take longer than seventeenth-century sailing vessels to reach their
destinations, spending over a year in miserable and meandering transit. At their lowest
depths, capitalist labor markets exhibit a miserly patience" (Sekula, 1995, page 50).
The ocean as nostalgic space
The sea is also an object of consumption: a space (and a view) that provides historical
groundings for the tourist-oriented spectacles that increasingly characterize the 'post-
modern' urban waterfront. As scholars such as Baudrillard (1988) and Urry (1990;
1994) discuss, three dominant aspects of 'postmodern' capitalism are incessant move-
ment, the self-conscious production of places, and the perpetual consumption of
images (see also Harvey, 1989; Lash and Urry, 1994; Soja, 1989; 1996). These character-
istics all manifest themselves in tourism, where the tourist (by definition a moving
subject) seeks out notable places and consumes their images (Britton, 1991). Indeed,
the links between tourism and postmodernism are so strong that Urry (1990, page 87)
claims that even during the modern era tourism was "prefiguratively postmodern."
Nonetheless, for Urry, post modern tourism is distinguished by the gazed upon object's
lack of claim to authenticity and by the tourist who comprehends this charade but still
chooses to accept the presented object as an image to be consumed.
The image of the ocean as a space of nostalgia is particularly apparent in the
harborside festival marketplace, an increasingly popular urban redevelopment strategy
that both reflects the spatiality of postmodern capitalism (Kilian and Dodson, 1996)
and provides an ideal backdrop for promoting consumption of commodities within the
postmodern tourist economy (Goss, 1996). In the harborside festival marketplace, the
418 P E Steinberg
place's mercantile past is celebrated through the fetishization of human interactions
with marine space. These marketplaces are frequently located in former customs
houses or warehouses (or perhaps in a new building constructed to look like it had
served a former maritime function), fishing nets and anchors abound, and there may
even be a restored clipper ship parked outside. And, of course, the sea itself (or a
surrogate water body) is within view, providing, as it did during the industrial era,
romantic possibilities of escape, danger, and untamed nature. The difference from the
industrial era is that this image of alterity, although still linked with romantic escape, is
now also linked with the potential for asserting individuality through the consumption
of commodities. The sea is represented as a space of consumable icons and 'memories'.
This representation of ocean space rests uneasily alongside that of the ocean as an
empty space without value, an obstruction to be obliterated by the forces of hyper-
mobility. On the urban waterfront, in contrast, the sea and its landward referents are
fetishized as images to be consumed. Many of the goods sold at festival marketplaces
are marketed as global exotica in which the ocean adds value by contributing to global
differentiation. Yet the 'global village' rhetoric used in marketing these products (such
as 'global village') implies the time - space compression that is idealized by the repre-
sentation of the ocean as an empty space capable of being annihilated.
The uneasy balance of contradictory representations is largely achieved by portray-
ing the urban waterfront as a space of historical social activity but one that is now
devoid of any human interaction. Evidence of contemporary labor, production, or
transportationdockyards, fish markets, container terminalswould contradict the
ocean's separateness, and so designers of festival marketplaces consciously obscure such
signs of contemporary marine activity while flaunting the safely historical (Atkinson et al,
1997; Atkinson and Laurier, 1998; Goss, 1996; Sekula, 1995). The parallel with the
countryside presented to tourists in England is striking:
"The countryside is thought to embody some or all of the following features: a lack
of planning and regimentation, a vernacular quaint architecture, winding lanes and
a generally labyrinthine road system, and the virtues of tradition and the lack of
social intervention .... A particular feature of this construction of the rural land-
scape has been to erase from it farm machinery, labourers, tractors, telegraph wires,
concrete farm buildings, motorways, derelict land, polluted water, and more
recently nuclear power stations. What people see is therefore highly selective, and
it is the gaze which is central to people's appropriation" (Urry, 1990, page 97-98;
see also Mitchell, 1996; Williams, 1973).
Thus, the image of the sea as a space of nostalgia, like its image as annihilated
space, rests at a point of uneasy balance between the tendency to value individual
places and the idealization of placelessness, inherent in the need of capital to embody
fixity and mobility simultaneously. The sea is to be gazed at and even celebrated, but as
an actual place of production and transportation it is largely hidden.
The ocean as resource space
The image of the ocean as a resource-rich space to be rationally managed and sustainably
developed is itself in contradiction with the previous two. If the ocean is a cornucopia of
exploitable but fragile resources, then it could be neither a space amenable to annihila-
tion nor even a space dominated by a nostalgic consumable imagery. This third
representation of the ocean can also be traced to the present crisis of ocean governance
resulting from the intensification of both capital fixity and mobility. Capitalism has a
tendency to increasingly abstract space and time from nature (Lefebvre, 1991) and, as
Altvater notes, this abstraction forms the basis for capitalism's ecological contradiction:
The maritime mystique 41M
"The heterogeneity of physical transformation in real space and time-- that is, the
particularity of materials, place, and ecologyis at odds with the axiom of general
comparability in the world marketplace imposed by capitalism .... The space and
time of a society, and the physical time and space of nature, are in no way
identicaland this is especially true for capitalism. The logics of their respective
functional spaces collides [sic]. Ecological crisis can, in many regards, be under-
stood in terms of this collision" (Altvatcr, 1994, pages 79-80, 82).
In other words, the ecological contradiction of capitalism is rooted in its tendency to
disregard the specific material conditions of production and to abstract the temporal
and spatial contexts that place limits on the potential for transforming nature. The turn
to an environmentalist discourse can then be seen as a response to this contradiction.
Altvater's thesis is particularly persuasive when applied to the world ocean, for the
rise of the environmentalist image (the image of the ocean as a fragile resource space
to be sustainably managed) can be linked directly to the failings inherent in the spatial
and temporal abstractions of the two images considered previously. In the first case,
marine space and time are wished away by denying any significant materiality to the
ocean. In the second, nostalgia similarly reproduces these abstractions, but the
abstraction is primarily temporal; the specificity of today's maritime economy is lost
on consumers gazing upon icons of the maritime past.
The language of sustainable development suggests a belated recognition of this
ecological contradiction, as attempts are made to incorporate the material obstacles
of space and time into the business cycle, with corporate leadership providing environ-
mental stewardship (Bridge, 1998; O'Connor, 1994, pages 125- 151). This discourse of a
resource-rich but fragile ocean in need of comprehensive management and planning is
the result (Nichols, 1999). Thus, National Geographic asserts that individuals engaged in
fishing must come to terms with "this world of inevitable limits" and give way to long-
range planning and corporate management. This challenge has been taken up by
the Marine Stewardship Council, a joint effort of the multinational food corporation
Unilever and the World Wildlife Fund designed "to harness market forces and con-
sumer power in favour of healthy, well-maintained fisheries for the future" (Marine
Stewardship Council, 1997). Although National Geographic regrets the loss of the
independent fishing boat owner plying the ocean's wilds, the bureaucratization of
ocean management and the privatization of rights to its resources is presented as the
maturation of our attitudes toward nature. The stewardship of marine resources by
agents of capital is naturalized through explicit parallels to the enclosure of agricultural
land in the western United States: fisheries, like post-dust-bowl agriculture, must be
allowed to evolve into "big industry: highly regulated, tidy," where rational manage-
ment is applied for long-term sustainability (Parfit, 1995). Likewise, The Economist
declares:
"In fact, [the ocean] is a resource that must be preserved and harvested. To enhance
its uses, the water must become ever more like the land, with owners, laws and
limits. Fishermen must behave more like ranchers than hunters" {The Economist
1998, page 4).
This managerial environmentalist perspective is supportive of general guidelines
for governing the uses of the sea without actually mandating its governance as territory.
Indeed, parallels can be made with the mercantilist-era regime. Under both regimes,
the ocean is recognized as a crucial space for essential social processes but care is
taken to protect it from the ravages of competitive territorial states. The mercantilist
designation of the sea as a special space of commerce (res extra commercium), immune
to territorial appropriation but susceptible to exertions of social power, is being
paralleled by a postindustrial designation of the sea as a special space of nature
420 P E Steinberg
(res extra naturd). In contrast to the intervening industrial era, when the sea was
denigrated as a void between the terrestrial spaces of production and consumption,
the ocean is now once again configured as a significant space wherein states and
intergovernmental entities are permitted to exercise nonterritorial power so as to
manage the ocean's resources in a rational, efficiency-maximizing manner.
The regulatory policies consistent with this corporate environmentalism will likely
prove inadequate to resolve the ongoing spatial crisis in the regulation of ocean space.
Even if an ocean-management regime were to negotiate successfully the ecological
contradiction of capital, it still would need to negotiate capitalism's spatial contra-
diction. The account of the regulatory crisis surrounding the proposed manganese
nodule regime demonstrates that this spatial contradiction is increasingly intense in
ocean space, and it is questionable whether any regulatory regime that preserves the
sea's nonterritorial character (whether the 'common heritage' regime proposed at
UNCLOS III or a regime whereby stewardship of the ocean's resources is entrusted
to a global 'ecocracy') would provide enough security for potential investors in extra-
state production sites.
Conclusion: ocean space and social change
In this paper I have tried to demonstrate how three popular and dominant images of
ocean space actually emerge from long-standing tensions in the capitalist appropria-
tion of the ocean and how these images mask underlying contradictions in the spatial
and ecological organization of capital. I want to conclude by emphasizing that current
struggles over the disposition of ocean space are simultaneously about the direction of
social change.
There is a long history of the ocean as an arena of social transformation. It is
generally acknowledged that the early seventeenth century 'Battle of the Books' gave
birth to the modern structures of international law (Colombos, 1967, page 8), and
ocean law remains an important arena for shaping the system of international relations
that structures states as well as governing relations among them (Robles, 1996; Ruggie,
1993; Taylor, 1993; 1995). Along with contributing to some of the social categories that
have prevailed in land space, including modern notions of masculinity (Creighton,
1995) and class solidarity (Rediker, 1987), struggles over ocean access have also
inspired oppositional movements. They have provided an arena for challenging what
Shapiro (1997) calls the "violent cartographies" of statism. Thus Foucault points to the
ship at sea as the "heterotopia par excellence": "In civilizations without boats, dreams
dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates"
(Foucault, 1986, page 27). Historical examples of the role of the sea in forging alter-
native identities and social structures range from pirate bands (Kuhn, 1997) and
anarchist collectives (Sekula, 1995) to environmental movements (Brown and May,
1991) and diaspora nations (Gilroy, 1993)/
4
)
Building upon this history and reflecting on the recent Law of the Sea negotiations,
a number of scholars have suggested that the collective governance of the sea be used as
a model for radical notions of global citizenship and entitlements (Borgese, 1998; Pacem
in Maribus, 1992; Van Dyke et al, 1993). Keith (1977), in a discussion that has parallels
to the actual case of the proposed manganese nodule mining regime, speculates that the
emergence of 'floating cities' would likely challenge the entire system of territorial states
(4)
Others, however, question the liberatory potential of social reorganization at sea. In contrast
to Foucault, Virilio (1986, pages 37-49) holds that the ship at sea, rather than incorporating the
ocean's heterotopic (or 'smooth') properties, colonizes this once-resistant space. Likewise, there is
an ongoing debate about the progressivism of seventeenth and eighteenth century pirates
(Osborne, 1998).
The maritime mystique 421
that provides the foundational political divisions for capitalist competition. In literature
too, the sea is increasingly depicted as a space of social liberation from the oppressions
of militarism, capitalism, and patriarchy (Bcrthold, 1995), as in the novels of Oetavia
Butler, Ursula LcGuin, and Joan Slonezcwskl
Whether these visions of the sea as a site of social change come to fruition is not the
point. As we have seen from the recent example of manganese nodule mining, the crisis
in the regulation of ocean space has intensified to the point where, for a considerable
duration, the world's powers found themselves supporting a regime that seemed to
challenge the principles of capitalist enterprise. The broad support that this regime
received suggests the depth of the regulatory crisis, and in this context one should not
underestimate the transformative potential of struggles over oceanic space, resources,
and access.
This contextthe structural contradiction of capitalist spatialttyalso demon-
strates the superficiality (and indeed the danger) of the three images that increasingly
characterize ocean space. For the images not only tell partial stories, They obscure
material relations of exploitation experienced by those who derive their living from the
seaseafarers, dockworkcrs, artisanal fishing communities, and others who may be
'managed' out of existence by the regulatory strategics with which each image is aligned.
Despite their erasure from the popular imagination, these individuals experience on a
daily basis the fact that the ocean is a locus of intense capitalist contradiction and a
potential source of social change. To interpret this contradiction and to contribute to the
authoring of that social change, it is imperative that we look beyond the prevailing
ocean imagery and pierce the maritime mystique.
Acknowledgements. In writing this paper I have benefited from the contributions of countless
colleagues. Dick Pcct helped launch this project, Gavin Bridge aided in setting my course,
Freddie Roblcs provided an intellectual compass, Carolyn Trist encouraged my journey into
uncharted waters, John Grimes provided some last-minute piloting, and Karen Nichols helped
me find my political anchor. Neil Smith and the anonymous reviewers were invaluable for
pointing out rocks and shoals that threatened to capsize the project. I am grateful to all, and
any remaining errors are my own.
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