STRIFE ON THE GLOBAL COMMONS

Vijay Shankar


The run up to the Peloponnesian War (431-404
BC) was marked by a debate held in Sparta
amongst the Peloponnesian allies to determine
whether war against the aggressive seapower
Athens and the maritime Delian League was to be waged. The leadership of the war-like alliance lay with the powerful yet reluctant Spartan king Archidamus, a man of both intelligence and moderation. He questioned, “What sort of a war, then, are we going to fight? If we can neither defeat them at sea nor control the resources on which their navy depends, we shall do ourselves more harm than good.” To Archidamus, clearly, the inability to access and control the Global Commons of his era presaged defeat.
Global Commons is a term typically used to
describe international, supranational, and global
common pool resource domains. Global Commons
include the earth's shared resources, such as the
oceans, the atmosphere, outer space and the Polar
Regions. Cyberspace also meets the definition, but
for this examination will focus on the hydrosphere.
The parameters for enquiry necessarily include
physical tangibles of height, width, depth and the
awkward intangible of human history.
Mahan in “The Influence of Seapower upon
History” underscored three prescient perspectives
relating to the Commons. First, competition for
materials and markets is intrinsic to an ever
trussed global system. Second, the collaborative
nature of commerce on the one hand deters war,
while on the other engenders friction. Third, the
Global Commons require to be secured against
disruption and rapacious exploitation.
An understanding of the Commons must not suffer
from any delusions that explicit and recognised
conventions have evolved over the centuries. On
the contrary, till the middle of the last century what
passed for a principle was Hugo Grotius’ 1609
notion of Mare Liberum ; freedom of the seas. The
concept that the sea was international territory and
all nations were free to use it. The free-for-all
state of the Commons becomes evident in the fact
of the seaward limit of national sovereignty being
defined by the cannon-shot decree which would
suggest that it was the ability to control that
defined dominio n. By the middle of the twentieth
century the collapse of colonial empires and the
birth of new nations set into motion a dynamic that
demanded a change from cannon-shot rules and
lawlessness to equitability and responsibilities in
the Commons along with demarcation of territorial
and economic zones. The United Nations
Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS I, II &
III) met 1954 to 1982 to hammer out and define
rights and responsibilities of nations in their use of
the world’s oceans. The deliberations concluded in
1982 and became functional in 1994. Recognising
that that the sea bed is the repository of vast and
unguaged quantities of minerals, the Convention
provided for a regime relating to minerals on the
seabed outside any state's territorial waters or
Exclusive Economic Zone. It established an
International Seabed Authority to regulate seabed
mining and control distribution of royalties. To date
it has been ratified by 165 nations. Significantly,
the US Senate has snubbed the UNCLOS. What
critically mars the compact is its imprecision, its
illusory demand for the supranational and the
absence of a structure to secure the Global
Commons against disruption and rapacious
exploitation.
The current distressed state of the Commons is
discernible by the impact that globalisation has
had; strains of multi-polarity, anarchy of
expectations and the increasing tensions between
the demands for economic integration and the
stresses of fractured political divisions are
symptoms. Nations are persistently confronted by
the need to reconcile internal pressures with
intrusive external impulses at a time when the
efficacy of Power to bring on political outcomes is
in question. While most nations have sought
resolution and correctives within the framework of
the existing international order, China emerges as
an irony that has angled for and conspired to re-
write the rule book.
China’s rising comprehensive power has generated
an internal impulse to military growth and
unilateral intervention in its immediate
neighbourhood in the South and East China Sea
and its extended regions of economic interests. It
has developed and put in place strategies that
target the Commons to assure a favourable
consequence to what it perceives to be a strategic
competition for resources and control of the
seaways that enable movement. The consequences
of China activising artifices such as the Anti-
Access and Area Denial strategy and geo-political manoeuvres to establish the String of Pearls in the Indian Ocean Region evokes increasing shared anxieties and resistance by players in the same strategic milieu. Particularly at a time when the North Eastern Passage through the Arctic is emerging as receding ice cuts the Asia-Europe route via the Suez by half (from 23000 km to 11500 km) and technology opens the Antarctic to economic exploitation. The paradoxical effects of China’s contrivances are to undermine its own strategic standing, hasten counter-balancing alignments and urge a global logic of cooperative politics over imperious strategies.