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Ocean governance, maritimesecurity and the consequencesof modernity in Northeast AsiaChristian WirthPublished online: 18 Apr 2012.

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The Pacific Review, Vol. 25 No. 2 May 2012: 223–245

Ocean governance, maritime securityand the consequences of modernityin Northeast Asia

Christian Wirth

Abstract High economic growth rates, the revolution in telecommunications andthe end of the Cold War have brought about rapid and profound changes to thedomestic as well as regional environments of Northeast Asian governments. Themaritime sphere, where increasingly militarized state boundaries delineate politi-cal authority and economic activities link increasingly interdependent communitiestherein, bears high significance for the study of regional cooperation. This paperlooks at how the maritime sphere of Northeast Asia is represented in common po-litical and academic discourses of international relations. It finds that maritime af-fairs are firmly cast in the language of national security, and that empirical evidenceagainst perceived threats and related security imperatives is often neglected if notcompletely ignored. The paper argues that the maritime space, due to its specialcharacter, has become the stage on which the consequences of modernity appearparticularly strong. The relentless quest to develop and control the ocean clasheswith the notion of the sea as a space of global trade and communication flow. Atthe same time, the ocean as an entity itself is excluded from the discourse becauseit is irreconcilable with the conception of the international system of sovereign ter-ritorial units. As a result, the maritime sphere is seen as a dividing element betweennations rather than a connecting element, and salient environmental problems ofthe maritime space remain low on political and academic agendas. This is also aconsequence of mainstream methods of political science that continue to reproducediscourses of territorial division and fail to offer alternative approaches suitable forthe study of contemporary Northeast Asia.

Keywords Northeast Asia; maritime sphere; energy security; sea lane security; en-vironmental governance; territorial sovereignty.

Introduction

Academic conventions divide up reality into separate spheres, each with itsown theorizing (Cox 1981). The consequences of modern modes of scientific

Address: Research Associate, Waseda University Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, 1-21-1Nishiwaseda, Shinjuku-ku, 169-0051 Tokyo, Japan. E-mail: chwirth@gmail.com

The Pacific ReviewISSN 0951-2748 print/ISSN 1470-1332 online C© 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandfonline.comhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09512748.2012.658847

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enquiry and policy-making are particularly apparent when it comes to thediscourses and practices of ocean governance. Since ancient times North-east Asian waters, encompassing the East China Sea, the Yellow Sea andthe Sea of Japan, have not only served as an abundant reservoir of naturalresources, the maritime sphere was also the space in which human com-munities interacted across political boundaries in the forms of commerce,scientific and political exchange, and warfare. Under the impact of a setof developments commonly referred to as globalization, the economic andpolitical meaning of the maritime sphere changed. As a result of grow-ing populations and industrial production and consumption, the oceanbecame heavily polluted while ecosystems became significantly degraded(UNESCAP 2005). Further, the number of goods shipped across North-east Asian seas between the booming economies and the related consumermarkets soared. In short, the density of interaction within the ocean sphereincreased drastically, and the notion of a maritime world economy becamecrucial for explaining globalization (Cartier 1999).

Since the Northeast Asian boundaries of the Chinese, Korean, Russianand Japanese states largely concern the maritime sphere, the delimitationof ocean space into areas of clearly defined territorial jurisdictions hassignificant implications for how transactions between human communitiesare shaped. The system of territorial states enshrined in the United Nations(UN) Charter further expanded into the ocean with the promulgation ofthe UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in 1994. This wayof ordering human interaction and managing ecological systems raisesquestions about how to organize transactions among different politicalcommunities on the one hand, and human communities and the widerecosystem on the other.

I argue that maritime space, due to its special character, has become thestage on which the consequences of modernity appear particularly strong.The relentless quest to develop and control the ocean through geometriczoning clashes with the notion of the sea as a space of global trade andcommunication flows. This results in the perpetuation of securitization ofthe maritime sphere in terms of national security, thereby reifying the ter-ritorial dimension of states. At the same time, the ocean as an entity itselfis excluded from the discourse because its nature is irreconcilable with themodern conception of the territorially defined system of sovereign statesand bureaucratic institutions designed for economic development. As aresult, the maritime sphere is generally seen as a dividing rather than aconnecting element between societies, and salient environmental problemsoccupy low priorities on political and academic agendas. This is also a con-sequence of traditions of political science that rely on Cartesian methodsof enquiry manifest in disciplinary orthodoxy and assumptions about spa-tial order. While research on ocean governance remains confined to dis-ciplinary spheres, the adherence of political scientists to positivism and

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C. Wirth: Maritime Security Politics in Northeast Asia 225

the explicit or implicit focus on states as units of analysis continues toreproduce discourses of territorial sovereignty as well as political division,and therefore fails to offer alternatives suitable for the study of contempo-rary Northeast Asia.

The next section refers to existing studies and the background of the se-curitization of the maritime sphere in Northeast Asia. The third, fourthand fifth sections examine securitization arguments in the forms of thegeostrategic discourse of territorial integrity, the role of hydrocarbon re-sources such as oil and natural gas, and ship-borne trade to, from and withinNortheast Asia in the context of sea lanes of communication (SLOC) secu-rity. Sixth, fishery and environmental governance as trans-boundary issuesare discussed in relation to state sovereignty. The last section draws conclu-sions from the above cases in view of prospects for regional cooperation inNortheast Asia.

Analysing maritime affairs in Northeast Asia

Unlike Europe, East Asia has not witnessed a decline of military spend-ing since the end of the Cold War. While certain defence budgets, suchas the Japanese, generally remained stable, others steadily increased. Atthe same time, military security strategies have significantly evolved asNortheast Asian and US policy-makers continued to put more emphasison the modernization of their air forces, air defence and missile defencesystems, and their navies in particular (Hartfiel and Job 2007; Holmes andYoshihara 2010; Zhu 2009). The naval dimension is of primary interest dueto the ongoing disputes about territorial and Exclusive Economic Zone(EEZ) delimitation, and the importance attached to East Asian seas inview of concerns with energy and economic security. The disputes Japanhas with Russia over the four southernmost Kurile Islands/Northern Ter-ritories, with South Korea over Dokdo/Takeshima Island, with the gov-ernments in Beijing and Taipei over the EEZ delimitation in the EastChina Sea as well as the sovereignty over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands;the Chinese contentions with South Korea over the EEZ delimitationin the Yellow Sea, and with Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, Tai-wan and the Philippines in the South China Sea attract enormous po-litical and scholarly attention. One major reason therefore is that, inview of the discourse of a ‘rising China’, the maritime sphere figuresas a prominent indicator of how ‘peaceful’, as claimed by Chinese aca-demics and policy-makers, that rise really is (Christensen 1999; Ross2009), and how Beijing’s increasing influence can and should be contained,‘hedged’ against, or its ‘choices being shaped’. Moreover, as the June 2008Sino–Japanese consensus on the East China Sea is stalled and the 2002 Dec-laration on the Conduct of the Parties in the South China Sea remainsfragile, these maritime disputes are major points of contention among

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Northeast Asian governments that seriously hamper efforts at better re-gional cooperation, and may lead to armed conflicts.

With very few exceptions, such as Valencia and Amae (2003), Valencia(1996) or Paik (2005) who advocate the building of maritime regimes inEast Asia, the literature of political science dealing with the maritimesphere focuses rather narrowly on a few issues of seemingly intricate mar-itime conflicts. Emphasis is usually put on geopolitical arguments (Emmers2010; Holmes and Yoshihara 2008). Other major strands take legal per-spectives (Kim 1995; Valencia 2007; Zhou 2008; Zhu 2006), discuss theinfluence of nationalism in territorial disputes (Deans 2000; Jiang 2007;Manicom 2008), or focus on the backgrounds and political management ofthe disputes (Drifte 2009; Hara 2001; Koo 2009). In summary, instead ofcomprehensive analyses of ocean politics, one is left with accounts of theemergence and management of disputes rather than the exploration of rea-sons why ocean affairs are so heavily framed in terms of national security.Taking the East China Sea with a focus on Chinese and Japanese concernsas an example, this article critically examines different dimensions of secu-rity, illustrates their interplay and seeks to shed light on the assumptionsunderlying the political and scholarly discourses about maritime affairs inNortheast Asia.

A look at official documents and governmental statements shows that theEast China Sea is most likely the area where China and Japan, as the twomajor Asian actors of the regional security order, may clash in the eventof a political crisis. The escalation of tensions over the ownership of theDiaoyu/Senkaku Islands and the EEZ delimitation in September 2005 and2010 revealed this potential. The 1998 white paper, China’s National De-fense, refers to ‘disputes on territorial and marine rights and interests’, inan optimistic way and highlights the need to find settlements through ne-gotiations (SCPRC 1998). The 2000 edition (SCPRC 2000) raises the con-cern that ‘Encroachments on China’s sovereignty and interests in the SouthChina Sea are not infrequent, and some extra-regional countries are at-tempting to interfere in this issue.’ The 2006 document, for instance, men-tions the ‘growing complexities in the Asia-Pacific security environment’and ‘territorial disputes, conflicting claims over maritime rights and inter-ests,’ among others, as factors that ‘undermine trust and cooperation amongstates in the Asia-Pacific’ (SCPRC 2006). More explicit statements are reg-ularly voiced in the official press (China Daily 2009; Li 2009).

In Japanese defence white papers, concerns of territorial and EEZ de-limitation as well as sea lane security are voiced more explicitly. The2005 report Defense of Japan (MOD 2005: 14) comments on Chineseactivities:

In recent years, we have witnessed vigorous maritime activities byChinese naval vessels and oceanographic research ships navigating in

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waters near Japan. One of the most notable cases has been the inci-dent caused by a submerged Chinese nuclear powered submarine thatintruded into Japan’s territorial waters last November.

The more recent editions update in detail Chinese naval activities in wa-ters around Japan, including movements in the disputed areas consequentlytermed as ‘intrusions’ (MOD 2009).

In short, maritime issues, especially in the East China Sea, make for ma-jor Japanese security concerns vis-a-vis China, while the same issues rep-resent some of the most sensitive problems for Chinese policy-makers andstrongly influence public opinion towards Japan and the USA. Argumentsfor the securitization of the maritime sphere raised by Japanese, Chinese,as well as US defence analysts, and echoed by politicians and academics,revolve around the same three issues: defence of territorial integrity essen-tial for national security; access to hydrocarbon resources and rare metaldeposits in order to alleviate the shortage of domestic reserves; and safe-guarding of SLOC in order to secure the free circulation of trade flows.

Security is closely related to identity. Camilleri (2000: 308), in line withMcSweeney (1999), defines insecurity as ‘related to the experience of so-cial disruption, the fragility of social relationships, the absence of cog-nitive control over, or affective empathy with, various forms of humaninteraction.’ Thus, levels of insecurity increase during times of rapid socioe-conomic change, which leads to the securitization of certain issues basedon historical experience (Buzan et al. 1998). However, Caballero-Anthonyand Emmers (2006) point to the need for closer analysis of the nature andmotives of securitizing actors, the mechanisms at work, linkages betweensecurity issues, securitization outcomes, the influence of political systems,and the relevance of international norms. In exploring the strongly dividingconstruction of the Northeast Asian maritime sphere, the article seeks toanswer two questions:

1. How can we understand the strong securitization of the maritime sphereframed in terms of national security despite the rapidly increasing inter-dependence of Northeast Asian societies?

2. Why do questions of territorial and EEZ delimitation, as well as sea lanesecurity receive this much political and scholarly attention while salientquestions about environmental problems such as ocean pollution, thecrisis of fisheries and the surge in intra-regional ship-borne trade do not?

Due to the limited space, this study focuses on those aspects and areas ofthe maritime sphere that are deemed relevant by the governments in Tokyoand Beijing, and influence Northeast Asian politics. The next sections assessthe most common claims about maritime security and raises questions con-cerning their underlying assumptions.

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Japanese and Chinese constructions of maritime security

Military security: the imperative of securing strategicallyimportant footholds

Political and academic discourses about international security often high-light the strategic value of certain territories in the event of armed conflict.With regard to the East China Sea, and also several geographic features(reefs, rocks or islands) in the Western Pacific, these arguments are fre-quently made. For instance, the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands are partof an imagined ‘island chain’ that stretches from the southern main islandof Japan, Kyushu, south-westward including the Ryukyu (Okinawa) Islandsto Taiwan. Looking at a map, this ‘island chain’ appears to connect the big-ger land masses of Japan and Taiwan, thereby separating the East ChinaSea from the Western Pacific. Similar island groups can be found betweenTaiwan and the Philippine archipelago, north of Japan between Hokkaidoand Russia, and to the south of Japan scattered across the Western Pacificfrom just south of Tokyo to the Indonesian Irian Jaya. These island chainsare marked with thick red lines in the US Department of Defense’s AnnualReport to the US Congress titled Military Power of the People’s Republicof China 2006 (DOD 2006).

The construction of island chains by strategic analysts is used to drawlines that would mark barriers or defence perimeters relevant to surfaceand submarine combatants in the event of military conflict. How preciselythese island chains would be relevant in contemporary warfare often re-mains unclear though. Some refer to them as creating passages obliges, nar-row strips of water that vessels need to pass through, making them moreeasily spotted by adversaries, thereby providing tactical advantages for theside in control of these features and the surrounding waters. Apparently,this kind of strategy was employed during the Cold War as Japanese andUS submarines tried to contain Soviet boats within the semi-enclosed wa-ters of the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan (Holmes and Yoshihara2010). In this context, for instance, the features that Tokyo claims to beclassified as the Okinotori Islands (some experts describe it as ‘two erodingprotrusions no larger than king-size beds’) located 1,700 km south of Tokyo,are said to be of strategic importance in naval warfare (cited in Yoshikawa2007).

The natural environment of the oceans does have a significant impacton military operation and islands in the vast Pacific may be of strategicvalue. Apart from the need to assess the specific use of each feature in ques-tion, the geopolitical argument should be qualified in at least three respects.These are described by what McGwire calls the ‘Colonel’s fallacy’ (in Boothand Wheeler 2008: 59–61).

First, one should not confuse strategic planning with political analysis be-cause strategic planning inherently assumes not only the most likely but also

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the worst-case scenario of conflict, starting with the assumption of aggres-sive intent and a certain quality and quantity of capabilities. By focusing onworst-case scenarios of conflict, analysts and politicians create hegemonicdiscourses. Due to their very desire to eschew situations associated with theloss of control, political leaders prepare for resistance in the event of theworst case and thereby marginalize alternative courses of action as unlikelyor even impossible and tend to create self-fulfilling prophecies. Thus, suchsecuritization serves to define issues in terms and scope that match previ-ous experiences and are suitable for existing institutions to deal with by theapplication of their standard doctrines. Second, as countless historical ex-amples demonstrate, strategic thinkers, be they civilian analysts or militarystrategists, do have a strong propensity to prepare for the conflicts of to-morrow based on assumptions and strategies that have proved successfulin the past (Van Creveld 1991). This often leads to disastrous failures ofpolicies and military campaigns because change in technological, social andpolitical circumstances is underestimated, if not ignored, due to the appli-cation of outdated frames of reference. Third, even if worst-case scenarioswere to come true, tactical planning would depend heavily on the specificsituation of the contingencies to be addressed. Such details in the form ofcrucial tactical intelligence are, even hours ahead of planned operations,hard to get in sufficient quality and quantity. It is thus an impossible anddangerous undertaking to project courses of events into the distant futurein which basic assumptions underlying one’s reasoning will, more often thannot, fundamentally change.

Rethinking all these aspects leads to the conclusion that the discourse ofisland chains in China is essentially about the stages of the technical devel-opment of the Chinese Navy from a coastal defence force, termed as ‘brownwater’, towards a ‘blue water’ navy capable of operating on the high seas,and denying access to US forces in the event of a Taiwan contingency. ForJapanese strategists, island chains served for the purpose of the concep-tual delimitation of a ‘maritime safety zone’ based on the experience of theSecond World War naval blockade by the Allied forces, rather than actualtactical necessities (Graham 2006). In short, the importance attributed tothe disputed maritime territories in the East China Sea cannot be justifiedby military concerns because the features in question are, unlike the big-ger islands of the Okinawa and Mariana groups, not militarily importantenough.

If not militarily important per se, the heightening interests of nationalgovernments in delineating and defending as vast maritime territorial andEEZ borders as possible, the intensifying search for natural, especially en-ergy resources may be a more likely cause of the securitization of the mar-itime sphere. The East China Sea dispute between Japan and China, forinstance, became only salient after reports on the existence of hydrocarbonresources had been published in 1970 (Austin 1998).

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Energy security: the imperative of securing hydrocarbon resources

Energy security concerns gained salience after China became a net importerof oil in 1993 while its GDP continued to grow at double-digit rates (Zhao2008). The surging demand put domestic refining capacities, as well as trans-port infrastructure under heavy strain. Subsequently, the Chinese govern-ment and state-owned petroleum enterprises started their ‘going out’ strat-egy in search for supplies, including opportunities for direct investmentin the exploration for new oil reserves and the construction of pipelines(Buszynski 2006; Goldstein and Kozyrev 2006). On the background ofimpressive growth of the Chinese economy owing to large foreign directinvestment (FDI) inflows and surging demand from North American, Eu-ropean and Japanese consumers, this dynamic raised fears of future com-petition for scarce resources. In tandem, the oil price on the world marketcontinued to climb to an all-time high. It was not until the start of the finan-cial crisis in 2008, that voices that attributed the price-hike to speculation infinancial and commodity markets, rather than Chinese demand only weretaken seriously.

In this context, due to the fact that hydrocarbon resources are thought tolie under the South and East China Seas in considerable quantities, threatperceptions heightened mainly in two respects. First, national governmentscame to think that this increased the stake and strengthened the impera-tive to secure the concerned ocean space through EEZ delimitation. Sec-ond, in view of a possibly intensifying global resource competition alongmercantilist thought, not only did deposits need to be secured, but also thestronger consideration of transport to home markets in order to assure con-tinued flows of oil and gas. In Northeast Asia such concerns are particularlysalient because economies display heavy import dependencies on hydro-carbons, especially oil: 52 per cent, and rising, for China; close to 100 percent for Japan; and 100 per cent for South Korea (METI 2008; Wang 2010).Furthermore, South Korean (75 per cent), Japanese (90 per cent), and toa lesser extent Chinese (50 per cent) oil import dependencies are concen-trated on Middle Eastern deposits (DOE 2008).

The securitization of energy supply by proponents of maritime security,however, needs to be qualified in three respects: oil processing in the up-stream business; the production and distribution of petroleum products inthe downstream process; and oil dependencies of national economies ingeneral.

First, the fact that governments in East Asia disagree over EEZ delimita-tion means that the actual size of deposits cannot be explored without caus-ing diplomatic turbulence, and once sufficient deposits are confirmed, dis-putes hinder their development. Buszynski and Sazlan (2007) have shownthat in certain parts of the South China Sea, oil exploration has been ableto proceed despite disputed EEZ delimitation because it was ultimatelyin the interest of all parties to continue resource extraction. Hydrocarbon

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exploration is technically complex and needs to promise a sufficient returnon investment. In this regard, the kind and size of deposits in the EastChina Sea are highly speculative. For the entire area encompassing about22,000 km2, Chinese estimates range from 70 to 160 billion barrels (Bbbl)of oil, while foreign estimates are around 100 Bbbl. Natural gas depositswere estimated at 7 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) by a 1970 Japanese survey. Chi-nese estimates tend to be high and range between 175 and 210 Tcf. Withregard to the contested area of the Xihu/Okinawa basin, these numbers are20 million barrels of oil and 17.5 Tcf of natural gas by Chinese estimates(DOE 2008). Thus, if just over 20 million barrels of oil and 17.5 Tcf of nat-ural gas are expected to be found in the disputed area, this would coveronly four days of oil and five years of natural gas consumption in Japan asof 2007. This is of relevance for economic calculations because, due to theseparation of the continental shelf from the Japanese islands by the Ok-inawa trench, which inhibits the construction of undersea pipelines, addi-tional costs for the liquefaction and shipment natural gas need to be takeninto account (APERC 2000). Moreover, due to structural demographic andeconomic changes in the country, after a peak in 2005, demand is predictedto further decline (IEEJ 2006; METI 2008).

Second, unlike during the mercantilist era of sixteenth-century Europe,markets for natural resources, oil and natural gas in particular, are highlycommodified. This means that extracted crude oil when it leaves the drillingfacility, is channelled into global supply chains. Hydrocarbons are subse-quently traded, and speculated on, at commodity markets rather than ap-propriated and nationalized barrel by barrel. Thus, it is not necessarily de-cisive which company or state-owned enterprise explores and develops thedeposits, because overall increasing production rates will make more oilavailable for purchase by any buyer on the world market and the purchaseof equity interest does also have its drawbacks (Downs 2004; ICG 2008).Therefore, what really matters for the stability of energy supplies are suffi-cient investments into oil exploration and development. Given the monop-olies that oil corporations have in most countries, the resulting lack of mar-ket transparency and investment protection is what leads to poor marketcapacity, and may negatively affect supply (China Daily 2010a; Thornton2009). The determining factors of oil supply security, thus, are not the own-ership of oilfields, but rather the efficient functioning of production chains(Manning 2000).

Given the high oil dependency, the predecessor of the Japanese Ministryof Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), together with oil-importing com-panies, established a system for the storage of oil to bridge shortages such asexperienced during the oil crises of 1973 and 1979. At the end of 2007, thesenational and private reserves were sufficient to cover 182 days of the wholeJapanese consumption according to current patterns (METI 2008). Chinatoo, with technical assistance from the International Energy Agency, Japanand the USA, started to build up strategic oil reserves that could substitute

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for at least 30 days of imports in early 2010, and are scheduled to cover upto 100 days by 2020 (China Daily 2010b).

The lack of refining capacity had led to shortages in China that stoodin contrast with significant overcapacities in Japan (METI 2008). Sub-sequently, the Chinese state-owned enterprise CNPC (PetroChina) pur-chased a 45.5 per cent stake in Singapore Petroleum and received approvalto acquire a 49 per cent share of Nippon Oil’s Osaka refinery in June 2009(DOE 2008; Forbes 2008). On the other hand, the Chinese oil and gas indus-tries, despite the very limited liberalization, required and welcomed signifi-cant foreign investment in order to meet domestic demand (OECD 2002).

Political analysts and policy-makers, later than energy experts, becameaware of the interdependence of their economies, and their dependence onMiddle Eastern suppliers, which the recent economic dynamism in North-east Asia had further strengthened. As a result of the Chinese state-ledmodernization project, and the lingering late-developmentalism prevalentamong ocean-policy circles in Japan, mercantilist thought was revived. Mae-hara Seiji (2010: 23, 24), then Minister for Land, Infrastructure, Transportand Tourism and responsible for the Japan Coast Guard in January 2010,noted that ‘Japan, a small country territorially and with an aging popula-tion, must establish a secure foundation as an ocean state if it would con-tinue to thrive.’ In this regard he continued: ‘The waters surrounding Japancan be regarded as a gold mine for resources and energy.’ Further notingthat Japan’s marine industry ‘which first came on the world stage duringthe Meiji era, has been rapidly fading in recent years in the face of neigh-bouring Asian countries’ rapid development’, he announced the intent toestablish a growth strategy for Japan’s marine industry. He concluded that‘in order to secure Japan’s path into the future’ he will continue his efforts‘to tap the vast frontiers of the ocean’.

In summary, concerns that reflect anxieties about the continuation of fasteconomic growth in China, the decline of industrial production and eco-nomic stagnation in view of its international standing in Japan, and mutualfear of increasing interdependency continued to drive the securitization ofenergy supply and promote EEZ claims.

Economic security: the imperative of securing sea lanes

The freedom of navigation is a long-standing issue, most of all for states witha strong maritime presence such as the European colonial powers from themid-fifteenth century and the USA since the late eighteenth century. Theperceived imperative to control worldwide trade flows from the places ofresource extraction over shipping to the distribution of goods in domes-tic markets was one major reason for the build-up of ‘sea power’, whichmade for a substantial component of the sixteenth-century mercantilist ide-ology. This idea underlies contemporary concerns about sea lanes prevalent

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in security-policy-making circles in Beijing and Tokyo (Graham 2006; Zhao2008).

The think tank of the Chinese Ministry of State Security argued for acooperative approach to SLOC security (CICIR 2005). The positive thoughvery limited cooperation within the international anti-piracy missions in theGulf of Aden (Christoffersen 2009) shows, however, that these ideas did notfind much support among the relevant decision-makers, especially when itconcerns East Asian waters. Ye Helin (2009) from the Chinese Academy ofSocial Sciences posits that, given China’s economic miracle, it has ‘billionsof reasons to guard the safety of its SLOC’ and that the Malacca Straits‘which is overcrowded and increasingly fragile, not only illustrates China’sgrowth, but also exposes China’s deadly weakness.’

In 2001, the Ocean Policy Research Foundation (OPRF, Kaiyo seisakukenkyu zaidan), Japan’s leading think tank on maritime issues, supportedby the Nippon Foundation, released a report on Asian Sea Lane Securityand International Relations (OPRF 2001a).1 It highlights that freedom ofnavigation, especially along the route from the Middle East to Japan, is(OPRF 2001a: 1):

the fundament of its economic security in terms of imported oil, andtrade with Southeast Asia and Western Europe. And to the UnitedStates it is critical to the mobility and flexibility of its Seventh Fleet,and thus to the defense of its allies – Japan, South Korea, the Philip-pines and Thailand.

The report focuses on the Malacca and Singapore Straits and potentialcauses of interruption of this trade route. By doing so, it combines Japaneseeconomic interests and US military strategic interests of freedom of naviga-tion. The assessment that exemplifies Japanese concerns carries an alarmistundertone that basically concludes that it is necessary for the US Navy toprovide the public good of East Asian sea lane security. Due to the Chi-nese territorial claims in the East and South China Sea, the People’s Lib-eration Army (PLA) is seen as the main threat the USA and its allies haveto deal with. Mirroring these anxieties is what the Chinese press termed the‘Malacca dilemma’.2

This assessment requires clarification in several respects. First, while itindicates that China also relies on these sea lanes for its economic se-curity, the interdependence of East and Northeast Asian economies, in-cluding the heavy dependency of the Chinese economy on foreign tradeand investment, is hardly accounted for. Second, the political impact ofChinese assertiveness on its East Asian neighbours is not considered. In-stead of the likely ‘diplomatic chain reaction’ in the region (Austin 1998:321), Japanese voices such as those quoted above tend to see themselvesas being left facing Beijing alone, and therefore completely reliant on the

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USA. Third, when it comes to the main focus of Japanese and Chinese con-cerns, the Malacca Straits, the likely causes of the interruption of shippingare of technical and sub-national nature. Due to their draft, often reducingground clearance at the shallowest sections of the Malacca Straits to 1 m, forvery large (VLCC) and ultra large crude carriers (ULCC) with sizes greaterthan 160,000 and 250,000 dead weight tons (DWT), the passage through theLombok-Makassar Straits and the Sulawesi Sea-Surigao Strait is a require-ment of navigational safety.3 This has led to the notion of ‘Malacca-max’crude oil tankers optimized to carry the largest cargoes with lesser draughtthrough the strait. Moreover, Bateman et al. (2007) demonstrate that unlikein the Gulf of Aden, piracy in Southeast Asia is mostly affecting local traf-fic, and according to Mak (2006) has been exaggerated by the InternationalMaritime Bureau.

Apart from the fact that coastal states are primarily interested in keep-ing shipping lines open, Noer and Gregory (1996) calculated the additionalcosts in the hypothetical worst-case scenario of the closure of all sea lanestraversing Southeast Asia due to large-scale armed conflict involving In-donesia and necessary circumnavigation of Australia to amount to $8 bil-lion per year for all seaborne trade.4 With regard to Japanese oil imports,an additional cost of $1.5 billion in case of a closure of all sea lanes throughSoutheast Asia, a number seen as alarming in the preceding OPRF report,is now toned down by comparing it with the total amount of Japanese im-ports. The additional costs in the extreme case of a closure of the routesthrough the South China Sea in the event of armed conflict over the statusof the Spratly Islands between several of the surrounding claimants, are es-timated at a mere $200 million. Consequently, the Malacca and SingaporeStraits are not a priori ‘chokepoints’ for political reasons, but rather becauseof the economic imperatives of shipping companies to exploit any possi-ble reduction of transport costs by building ever larger ships and avoidingslightly longer voyages. Thus, perceived threats to the freedom of naviga-tion originating from national governments are the result of the discursiveconstruction of ‘chokepoints’.

Another OPRF (2001b) report released the same year changes the fo-cus away from national security. Nevertheless, at the outset, it reminds thereader of the ‘timeless message’ of Alfred Thayer Mahan, a nineteenth-century US Navy Rear Admiral known for his advocacy of naval armsbuild-up and an imperialist stance, that ‘When fashioning a national secu-rity policy, it is essential to take stock of the World’s sealanes, as they holdthe keys to a nation’s prosperity and standing in the world’ (OPRF 2001b:2). Subsequently, however, the report goes on to emphasize the importanceof trade, stating that in 2000 intra-Asian trade made for 50 per cent of allthe traffic in Asian ports and more than 70 per cent in Yokohama, Tokyo,and Hong Kong. This is compared to a mere 40–50 per cent for Europeanhub ports. Moreover, the report demonstrates that the containerization,and therewith the unbundling of international trade is rapidly increasing

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due to higher efficiency in handling freight that can seamlessly and moreand more automatically be transferred from ship to rail and trucks.

A further argument against securitization is the continuing denationaliza-tion of the world’s merchant fleet. More and more ships travel under flagsthat do not match their operators’ origin. Additionally, ownership struc-tures dictated by economic considerations mean that the control over a ves-sel cannot be attributed to one company alone, let alone to a single state.Apart from multiple owners of freight, the stakeholders involved are notonly the flag state, but also the operating, including subsidiary and hold-ing companies, banks and insurance companies. Thus, it is far from realityto imagine something as a ‘national fleet’, which would allow for the cleardistinction between friend and foe. This is also true for China’s crude oilimports of which in 2008 only 10 per cent came aboard what could be de-scribed as ‘Chinese’ vessels (Zhao 2008).

The difficulty of fleet nationalization is reflected in the operational guide-lines for Japanese warships protecting merchant vessels from piracy attackin the Gulf of Aden. In order to make sense, the mandate needed to beextended to include: Japan-registered ships; foreign-registered ships withJapanese crew members on board; and foreign registered-ships operated byJapanese shipping companies, and foreign-registered ships with Japanesecargo on board, which are important for the stable economic activities ofJapanese people (MOD 2009: 190). In this regard, Yamamoto (2004) notesthat the ‘Japanese’ merchant marine depends on foreign seafarers to covermore than 90 per cent of its need for crew.

In summary, the SLOC security discourse represents anxieties aboutthe loss of cognitive control due to the increasing interdependence ofeconomies and societies in general, and expanding sovereign and jurisdic-tional claims that regulate the free flow of goods over the ocean in partic-ular. The next section looks at how the management of natural resourceexploitation other than hydrocarbons and the consequences of economicdevelopment in the form of ocean pollution influenced the political concep-tion of the maritime sphere.

Environmental security: pollution, fishery and the securing of food

With economic development and dietary transition, world fish consumptionhas undergone major changes in the past four decades and contributed tothe worldwide crisis of fisheries (FAO 2009). The Northwest Pacific is byfar the world’s most important fishery region as China remains by far theworld’s largest producer, with a reported fisheries production of 51.5 mil-lion tons in 2006 (17.1 and 34.4 million tons, from capture and aquaculture,respectively), whereas Japan is just ahead of the USA, the world’s biggestimporter of fishery products (FAO 2009: 11).

Due to the adoption of the global UNCLOS EEZ regime and becauseof the need to enhance the sustainable management of fish stocks, as well

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as the prevention of related fishery disputes, Tokyo and Beijing have beenpressed to revise the existing fishery order and reached a new agreementin September 1997. The main feature of the new fishery agreement is the‘provisional measures zone’ (PMZ), which covers the disputed area in themiddle of the East China Sea, 52 nautical miles (NM) off the Chinese andJapanese baselines. The 1997 bilateral agreement is also significant becauseits impact on both national economies is considerable, and represents anoutstanding political compromise between two states with otherwise verycomplicated diplomatic relations. As a result of the implementation of thenew agreement, due to the imposition of stricter quotas, the Japanese andChinese fishery industries suffered considerably (Valencia and Amae 2003;Xue 2004). Given fish migration patterns, and the ever farther venturingfishing fleets, however, regimes based on bilateral agreements are far fromsufficient to guarantee sustainability.

The shortcomings of bilateralism also plague law enforcement. From1999, Chinese and Japanese officials tasked with coastguard duties startedto meet, and the North Pacific Coast Guard Forum (NPCGF), a Japaneseinitiative, has since its inception in 2000, developed. From the discussion ofinitially general topics of law enforcement at sea, the participants movedto work on joint documents, and within several working groups addressedvarious problems they were facing. From 2005, apart from two annual meet-ings, exercises related to the working group topics were also conductedat sea. Despite its success, the NPCGF remains a confidence and securitybuilding measure rather than a framework of functional cooperation.5

Pollution of Northeast Asian seas is another salient issue. Harmful algalblooms (HAB), or red tides, occurred in all Northeast Asian waters, butwere concentrated along the coast of northern Kyushu and the southerncoast of Korea, as well as the Bohai Sea. Twenty-three per cent of cases ofred tides in the Bohai Sea were larger than 1,000 km2, and usually lastedabout one week. In 1989, the poisoning of shellfish, for instance, caused to-tal losses of $38 million to aquaculture farms around the Bohai Sea alone(NOWPAP POMRAC 2007: 32–8). The reason for the increasing occur-rence of HAB since the 1970s lies in the eutrophication of the seas due toexcessive nutrient input, mostly from domestic and agricultural wastewaterdischarge. Along with the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea and the North-east Atlantic, East Asian seas are classified as high-risk oil spill regions bythe International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation (ITOPF). Between1990 and 2005, the Sea of Japan and the northern part of the East China Seaexperienced at least 19 major oil spills larger than 1,000 tonnes (NOWPAPPOMRAC 2007: 40).

Given this evidence, one would expect a certain degree of securiti-zation, or at least decisive action by governmental bodies in addressingtransnational environmental problems. However, the assessment of North-east Asian environmental cooperation mechanisms reveals that intergov-ernmental cooperation at the working level is fraught with various problems

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ranging from questions of financing to transparency and governing capac-ity (Nam 2002; Wirth 2010). The positive rhetoric at high-level meetingsbetween heads of state, prime ministers and environment ministers, whichso often stress the importance of environmental protection, and pro-grammes such as the North West Pacific Action Plan (NOWPAP), the Part-nership in Environmental Management for the Seas in East Asia (PEM-SEA) and others, did not translate into decisive action as these initiativesremain severely underfunded and have for several years been stuck at thestage of initial pilot projects (TJR 2009).

In a study of the prospects for effective marine governance in the North-west Pacific area, Haas (2000) comes to the conclusion that the reason forthe limited progress of NOWPAP compared to other regions is due to thepreoccupation of East Asian governments with economic growth, especiallyduring the financial crisis (of the late 1990s). He finds that there was a lackof visionary national leadership in the environmental field all over North-east Asia. Even 10 years ago, Haas pointed to the fact that most discussionson environmental management were cast in terms of energy-efficient tech-nology that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the long term, thatis, technical solutions introduced by market mechanisms instead of concretepolicy measures to address pressing concerns. Elliott (2007) finds that thereis insufficient interaction between the respective communities of environ-mental management and security policy actors, and that the former are of-ten not taken seriously by the latter.

In summary, salient problems of environmental degradation and oceanresource depletion, despite talk of environmental sustainability in publica-tions such as those issued by the OPRF, and by state leaders, gained scantattention outside their respective epistemic communities, which remainedseriously underfunded. Moreover, the practice of geometrical ocean zoning,and their delimitation, inhibited research and implementation of effectivemeasures. The discussion of questions of military, energy, economic andenvironmental security in the previous three sections revealed that despitesome reasons for debate, none of the issues can adequately be understoodand addressed by the application of a territorially based framework of anal-ysis. The next section aims to shed more light on why this thinking is stillprevalent.

The persistence of modern conceptions of sovereignty and theterritorial trap of international relations studies

Pye (1971) argued that it is due to the changing national identity con-structions in the course of development that political elites in developingcountries are paying particularly high attention to the territorial delimi-tation of their states, feeling the need to guarantee economic and energysecurity, and are keen to assert their international status. Moreover, as

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developing countries by definition lag behind in the establishment of bu-reaucratic and political institutions, the likelihood of inter-agency com-petition spilling over into the international realm increases. Indeed, thelack of oversight and control over the seven agencies involved in varioustasks of ocean governance was most likely the reason why two Chinesemaritime research ships entered the Japanese-claimed waters around theDiaoyu/Senkaku Islands just ahead of Hu Jintao’s trip to the first ever tri-partite summit with his South Korean and Japanese counterparts in Japanin December 2008.6 Also, the difficulties of bureaucracies and governmentsin proposing, formulating and implementing coherent ocean policies dueto the fragmentation of national policy-making and orthodox disciplinarythinking results in low governmental capacity, a phenomenon that is notlimited to developing countries (Dupont 2001; Valencia 1996; Wirth 2010).These explanations correspond to other literature discussing Chinese prac-tices of sovereignty (Deng 2000; Zheng 1999).

However, if the defining feature is the state of development and ad-ministrative capacity, as Pye argues, the question remains why the USand Japanese governments and linked international politics research in-stitutions are among the primary securitizers and why they are, similarlyto their Chinese counterparts, very sensitive to the delimitation of mar-itime jurisdiction and the freedom of navigation, respectively (Dutton 2009;Hoyt 2007; Posen 2003). The habit of privileged, axiomatic and often out-of-context quoting of A. T. Mahan, a nineteenth-century imperialist navalstrategist, in most contemporary writings on conventional maritime securityis an interesting phenomenon, which, however, cannot be addressed here.

Steinberg’s (2001) explanation that the contemporary construction of theocean is a result of three contradicting elements of modernization – namely,the idealization of the deep seas as a great void of distance subject to anni-hilation for the acceleration of economic flows; the increasing territorializa-tion of the seas to enable development by spatially fixed investments; andthe designation of specific areas of the seas as spaces of stewardship – is veryinsightful. OPRF publications that cover maritime affairs comprehensively,discuss topics related to all three elements. However, as the proponents ofthe 2006 Basic Ocean Policy Law openly state, the primary concerns behindthese various issues are territorial integrity and natural resource develop-ment (Takemi 2006).

The above discussion leads to the finding that the second element thatemphasizes territorial control and natural resource development has be-come more and more salient with the rapid growth of East Asian economiesover recent decades. As a result, imperatives to develop natural resourcesclash with concerns about the freedom of navigation embodied in the firstelement. This contradiction manifest in threats perceived from ‘creepingjurisdiction’, that is the extension of national and international regulationslimiting the ‘freedom of the seas’, promotes the strong securitization of themaritime sphere which becomes apparent in the reification of the principle

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of territorial sovereignty. The excessive focus on territorial aspects of po-litical authority overrides the third element of ocean stewardship, whichemphasizes the sustainable use and the connecting elements of the oceansuch as ecologic and economic interdependence. This phenomenon, divid-ing reality into different spheres, in turn perpetuates concerns of nationalsecurity by fuelling discourses of maritime security and state sovereigntythat are unsuitable to understand the present environment.

Due to the special character of the ocean as uninhabitable space inwhich nevertheless a wide range of human activities across many differ-ent sectors of society take place, the maritime sphere represents a politi-cal frontier where anxieties pertaining to the future of societies relying oneconomic growth and increasingly interdependent with one another areprojected into. Because access to, and expertise in, a wide range of scientificknowledge is necessary to comprehend the meaning of the ocean, securi-tizing arguments largely remain unquestioned in political discourses. Thiswould also explain why maritime territorial disputes are even more difficultto solve than terrestrial ones, as the cases of China and Japan demonstrate.With the exception of India, Beijing has settled all its territorial disputes onland. However, Japan, just as China, seems far from settling its maritimeboundary disputes (Carlson 2005).

Given that territorial sovereignty, as practised by governments and dis-cussed in scholarly writings dealing with East Asian maritime affairs, is un-able to deal with the various aspects of ocean governance, it is necessary torethink this concept that is so central to the study of international politics.As Agnew (2005: 438–41) argues: ‘Effective sovereignty is not necessarilypredicated on and defined by the strict and fixed territorial boundaries ofindividual states.’ He points to three problematic assumptions. First, thatsovereignty is acquired exogenously, or in a ‘state of nature’, rather than inan ongoing system of states. Second, notwithstanding the obvious reality ofhierarchy in power between actors in world politics, an essential equalitybetween sovereign states is more often than not unquestioned. Third, it isimagined that sovereignty is invariably territorial or exercised over blocs ofterrestrial space.

Rethinking territoriality and sovereignty does not only require that schol-ars of international relations overcome the ‘territorial trap’ in which theirdiscipline remains caught up and look out for the connecting elements ininternational politics (Agnew 1994). It means that a deeper discussion ofthe nature of the political, of the community and the legitimacy of authorityis necessary (Camilleri 2008).

Conclusion

In conclusion, state developmentalism understood as nationalist projectsemanating from the background of the not-too-distant (cold) wartime his-tory and its aftermath (Beeson 2009; Johnson 1995), despite its changing

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nature, accounts for the findings that national governments seek to controland develop the ocean by territorial delimitation while at the same time be-ing concerned about the freedom of shipping, and neglecting the sustainablemanagement of the ocean as an ecosystem. At a time when the task of gov-ernance becomes ever more complex and the creation of stable social order,that is, the provision of security, requires more than economic growth, it isnecessary to reassess the role and effectiveness of central political authorityembodied in the primacy given to national governments in organizing soci-eties in general and ocean governance in particular. This requires a shift ofattention towards institutional arrangements and political priorities essen-tial for the maintenance of social order and the production of security forhuman communities at the local as well as the regional levels. If the securi-tization of the maritime sphere in terms of the national is a result of diffusefears about the continuation of familiar structures of social, economic andpolitical life, that is, the uncertainty of the future rather than grounded inspecific evidence, two important questions arise. First, how and on whichsocietal and political background has the meaning of the maritime sphereas a site for the production of external danger to state identities and theensuing effect of discipline of populations (Campbell 1992) developed overtime, and second, how does the power structure of the Asia-Pacific continueto influence Northeast Asian state developmentalisms after the end of theCold War?

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their veryinsightful and helpful comments.

Notes

1 The Nippon Foundation was founded by Sasakawa Ryoichi in the 1960s. Apartfrom supporting humanitarian projects, its main objective has been to promoteJapan’s maritime industries.

2 In November 2003 President Hu Jintao declared that ‘certain major powers’ werebent on controlling the strait, and called for the adoption of new strategies to mit-igate the perceived vulnerability. Thereafter, the Chinese press devoted consid-erable attention to the country’s ‘Malacca dilemma’, leading one newspaper todeclare: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that whoever controls the Strait of Malaccawill also have a stranglehold on the energy route of China’ (Shi 2004).

3 The Malacca Strait at its shallowest stretch is only between 21.1 and 22.9 m deep.Despite the prescriptions by coastal states of a clearance of 3.5 m, shipping com-panies often load their vessels up to a draft barely observing the necessary 1-moperational clearance (Noer and Gregory 1996: 27).

4 The study by Noer and Gregory (1996) is based on data of 1993. Although nopublicly accessible update is available, the surge in intra-regional trade flows

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and continuing containerization reinforce the de-securitization claims derivedfrom it.

5 Canadian Coast Guard website: http://www.ccg-gcc.gc.ca/e00078696 Personal conversations, Peking University and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bei-

jing; Ministry of Defense, Tokyo, April 2009.

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