The Maritime Mystique: Sustainable Development, Capital Mobility, and Nostalgia in the World Ocean

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 hypermobile 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 contradictions, 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.

Global communication and the post-statism of cyberspace: a spatial constructivist view

“…Between 1959 and 1998, international air freight increased from 1,630 million to 230,000 million tonne-kilometres, while during the same period goods transported internationally by ship increased from 996 million to 5,064 million metric tonnes (ICAO, 1998;UNCTAD, 1969;. These domains historically have presented the challenge of establishing regulatory measures that, on the one hand, facilitate the movement of goods and services across a frictionless space that transcends state borders and, on the other hand, facilitate the in-state placement of spatially fixed infrastructural improvements that enable movement and profit-generation by those coordinating this movement (Steinberg, 2001).…”

“…On the one hand, proponents of global cyberspace champion it as an arena of trade, a friction-free space of flows that transcends state boundaries and exists outside the essential domain of the state, much like the transportation-space of the ocean; indeed, some advertisements for telecommunication and finance firms use images of the ocean to highlight their space-annihilation designs for cyberspace (Steinberg, 1999). On the other hand, those who write about the new 'information society' typically highlight a new, post-industrial mode of production, likening activities occurring in cyberspace to those that were associated with farms, workshops, and factories during previous modes of production.…”

“…Space is simply the abstract plane of distance upon which these developable 'places' are located, a surface that must be crossed as places trade with each other and exchange resources (Soja, 1980). Movement, whether of capital, commodities, labour, or information, thus is reduced to a secondary status within this liberal model of development, and spaces of movement are perceived of as fundamentally asocial spaces between the territories wherein investment, transformation of nature, and social and state development transpire (Steinberg, 1998). Of course, social scientists who subscribe to this liberal perspective on space recognize that trade occurs and that investments move, but these are seen as derivative activities that may either enhance the development of resources in state territory (the neoliberal position) or threaten the state's power base (the neorealist position).…”

“…As the space's uses intensify and diversify, and as fixed investments are made to enable the 'annihilation of space with time', the regulatory system likely will become more complex and states will play a more direct role so as to facilitate the placement and security of fixed investments as well as continuing to preserve the space's functionality as a domain of flows. As use of the space for movement and use of the space for locating fixed investments both increase, the institutional structures supportive of each tendency are likely to conflict, and a crisis of regulation will ensue (Steinberg 1999).…”

Beyond Free Trade

“…13 While in retrospect the signing of the WTO in the same year would seem to be a crucial parallel occurrence, analyses in the 1990s attributed the compromise to a desire of both the South and the North for consensus in a period of declining mineral prices, when the actual prospect of deep-sea mining was decades away. Ultimately, via the Implementation Agreement, the ISA was reduced to a 'permitting organization' operating via free market principles (Steinberg 1999;Robles 1996).…”