ABSTRACT
On September 28th, 1945 Harry Truman unilaterally extended the United States’ jurisdiction over all ocean resources to the limit of the continental shelf. As a unilateral projection of sovereignty, Truman’s Proclamation transformed ‘the ocean’ into a field of power relations via an authoritative speech act. This event, one of a growing number of ‘sea appropriations’ ongoing as of writing, brings us into the trajectory of unilateral projections of national sovereignty, and indicates an often-missed importance of the ocean in imperial and postwar transformations of sovereignty. The ocean is a resource that is simultaneously metaphoric and conceptual, material and normative. In 1954 one legal commentary observed that “within the past twelve years States in various parts of the world have enacted laws exercising power of a part of the earth’s surface until now considered not to be within the sovereignty of man”. Truman’s proclamation claimed the ocean’s resources for the United States in a place where American state sovereignty was not; but doing so opened the ocean to claims capable of producing a paradoxical passage for sovereign authority, allowing sovereign speech a place to declare itself authoritatively where it was and was not. Over time, Truman’s proclamation of this jurisdiction extended and transformed one set of understandings of what sovereignty means and where it applies. Not for the first time, but in a way that had never been expressed until that moment, the ocean was marked as a jurisdiction far beyond the territorial limit where (sovereign, domestic, state) law remained contained, far beyond the socially secured democratic lives of (rights-bearing, nationally counted, welfare-deserving, publicly represented) citizen populations.
In this chapter, returning to Schmitt with Carlo Galli and the epistemology of Luhmann’s social systems theory, I explore how Truman’s proclamation indicates a jurisdictional blind spot in the territorially based, Eurocentric theories of state sovereignty expressed in shorthand by Max Weber and the Montevideo Convention of 1933, along with intensely territorially focused recent theories of sovereign power and sovereign walling. As a counterclaim, I explore the politically potent senses in which ‘the ocean is not the territory’. As a place where no population can live, the ocean cannot be appropriated, owned, or dominated by a state as sovereign in territorial ways; yet at the same time a key stake in twenty-first-century appropriation has to reckon with ‘sea appropriations’. The key political effect is that Truman’s proclamation reached right out into the oceanic space to make authoritative claims that could later be used to harvest sovereign authority from maritime jurisdictions: not just extra-territorial, but oceanic, a different enacted imagination of political power we would do well to reckon with directly.
