ABSTRACT
The distinctive features of maritime governance are owed to the fact that human beings live on land. Yet water is essential to our existence, biologically and socially. All the great cities of earlier times, and nearly all those that exist today, stand along the coasts of the world’s oceans, or on the banks of the navigable rivers that flow into them. The watery features of our planet’s geography have served equally to divide and to unite mankind. Traditional societies considered rivers the best and most natural political frontiers. Yet the same rivers that helped to keep armies apart also connected the towns and cities that grew up upon along their length, irrespective of the political frontiers that may have intervened. Oceans have likewise served as both barrier and highway-more the former in earlier times, more the latter today. Unlike rivers, however, oceans cannot be governed directly from the land,
certainly not by the mere extension of lubberly principles into the maritime realm. For two centuries following the discovery of the new world, Europeans sought to translate their new-found mastery of transoceanic navigation into far-reaching claims of sovereignty over the sea; a practice whose fatuity was equalled only by its potential to engender conflict and strife, as each new declaration piled up on the last. It was the implausible accumulation and inevitable collapse of such claims that gave rise to the modern law of the sea, which seeks to limit the sovereign rights of states, within a broader legal order designed to secure for mankind in general what the great Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius called ‘the freedom of the sea’; which freedom, like all others, is dependent upon the rule of law.
