Posts Tagged ‘geopolitics’
“Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part”*…
If only. All of us on this interconnected planet are deeply beholden to our oceans; but all too few of us, all too infrequently, pay them heed. Surabhi Ranganathan explores one too-seldom considered dimension in which we need to address that deficit: the “Law of the Sea.” As she explains, the growing international competition for reclamation, navigation, cabling, and undersea resource rights, against the backdrop of climate change, demand a radically-revised approach…
I write this essay in an office in Singapore, where I have just learned an arresting fact. The legal historians Antony Anghie and Kevin Tan have informed me that in the course of my arrival, via Terminal 3 of Singapore’s Changi Airport, I must have crossed – on foot – the probable spot where, more than 400 years ago, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) Captain Jacob van Heemskerk captured the Santa Catarina, a Portuguese ship. This makes sense: in Martine van Ittersum’s rich description of the incident, she notes that it took place at the entrance of the Singapore Straits. Heemskerk, the story goes, made a wild dash to Johor from Tioman Island upon receiving news that two Portuguese carracks laden with spices, silks, and porcelain, would be moving through the Straits. Having missed the first, he awoke on the morning of February 25, 1603, to find the second, the Catarina, right before his eyes. He swiftly captured the ship just off Singapore’s eastern shoals. In the time since that event, projects of reclamation have increased Singapore’s total land area by 25 percent, and Changi airport occupies one such reclaimed part, sitting where the shoals used to be.
The Catarina’s capture occupies an important place in the history of international law. The incident was part of an imperial struggle between European states over access to trade with the East Indies. Such trade promised fabulous wealth: the goods recovered from this event alone sold for over three million guilders in the markets of Amsterdam, an amount that was roughly double the capital of the English East India Company. Portugal was outraged by the loss, while the VOC was keen to defend its actions. On retainer from the company, the jurist Hugo Grotius—then just in his early twenties!—wrote a brief that is now regarded as a foundational text, Mare Liberum, or The Free Sea.
Grotius argued that the sea was entirely unlike land. Land, being fixed, cultivable and, most importantly, exhausted by its use, could be regarded as divisible, subject to public and private ownership, and demarcated by national boundaries. The sea was fluid and constantly in movement; it was indivisible, unoccupiable, inexhaustible, indeed unalterable for better or worse via human activity. As such, it was irreducible to private ownership or state sovereignty. That being the case, it was Portugal that had acted wrongfully in claiming exclusive rights of maritime navigation and commerce with the Indies.
The Grotian imaginary of the sea persisted for centuries. The principle of the freedom of the seas came to define oceanic activities from navigation to fishing. Indeed, modern international law continues to express a principle of maritime freedom, though it is a far narrower form of freedom than Grotius initially claimed.
Today, international treaties, states, institutions, corporations, and courts all recognize that the ocean is divisible and, in parts even appropriable, in the same way as land. Oceanic resources are exhaustible and can also be enhanced by human endeavor: cultivation through new methods like aquaculture is increasingly seen as essential to assure the global supply of fish. In the decades since the Second World War, a dense network of legal rules on access, use-rights, and responsibilities have developed to regulate the crowding conglomerations of interests and territorial claims upon the oceans.
Moreover, international law has been increasingly called upon not only to articulate the ways land and sea resemble each other, but also to address the mutability of those very categories. Thanks to legal and technological innovations, what was once sea might become land: the reclamation projects that have accounted for the site of Changi Airport are but one example. In the other direction, rising sea levels and intensifying critical weather events can quickly turn what was once land into sea. Down in the deep, the binary between land and sea is confounded by formations which appear as neither fully one nor quite the other.
The shifting relation between land and sea reflects the scale of human impact on the environment. This unstable relation forces us to confront the consequences of climate change, as the fixed certainties — soil, resources, infrastructure – that have for so long governed our imagination of land begin to fall apart. As a result, we must contend with new expectations of, and investments in, the sea…
Down in the deep, the legal distinction between land and sea no longer holds– and that’s a problem: “The Law of the Sea,” from @SurabhiRanganat in @thedialmag.
* Hermann Broch
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As we go deep, we might recall that it was on this date in 1911 that RMS Titanic was launched from the boatyard in Belfast in which it was built, the largest passenger ship of its day. A state-of-the-art steamship, it set sail from Southampton on its maiden voyage on march 10th of the following year, bound for New York City. Four days later, after calls at Cherbourg in France and Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland, the “unsinkable” Titanic collided with the iceberg that sent it under in the North Atlantic, 375 miles south of Newfoundland.
When the location of the wreck of Titanic was discovered in 1985, there was fear that extant Admiralty law would allow for the “looting” of what its discoverer believed should be “a monument.” In an example that the Law of the Sea can in fact be revised, the RMS Titanic Maritime Memorial Act was passed in 1986. (After the Act’s passing, the Department of State proposed an agreement with the United Kingdom, Canada and France (as well as other interested countries) to enact the policies from the 1986 Act on an international scale… the U.K. ratified it briskly, but the U.S. didn’t get around to it until 2019. France and Canada are pending. In the meantime, the wreck of Titanic has been revisited on numerous occasions by explorers, scientists, filmmakers, tourists and salvagers, who have recovered thousands of items from the debris field for conservation, public display… and sale.
“One bullion cube… one Concord grape… one Philly cheese-steak… and a jar of garlic pickles! No one will want to kiss me after these, eh, Smithers?”*…
Kunwar Khuldune Shahid explains how immigration patterns and global politics — plus a bit of serendipity — intertwined to make Philadelphia’s iconic sandwich a hit in a 13-million-resident Pakistani megalopolis…
… [Chef Mazhar] Hussain has worked at some of the most high-profile restaurants in Lahore — Monal, Tuscany Courtyard, Chaayé Khana and Café Aylanto, among others — covering a wide range of cuisines. His experience at Philly’s Steak Sandwich, though, has been unique. It’s a smaller restaurant than those, he says, and the guests come from all walks of life. The one thing that connects them: “The steak sandwich is extremely popular with everyone.”
Philly’s Steak Sandwich sits on a small highway apart from Johar Town’s main food centers, atop a hair salon. The shop fights for customers with a biryani restaurant across the street and buzzes all evening with motorbikes and cars jammed into the cramped parking spaces. The cheesesteak is especially popular among nearby students, who can enjoy it for PKR 579, or a little over two bucks.
…
Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city and the capital of the historic Punjab region, is considered the country’s food hub (although citizens of Karachi loudly dispute that claim). Its location at the crossroads of the many empires to have ruled over the Indian subcontinent, from the Mughals to the British, has added multicultural layers to Lahori heritage and culture. This is reflected in the city’s food, which blends Persian and Afghan flavors, a combination we now deem synonymous with the cuisine of North India — which Lahore was an integral part of before the 1947 partition created what is today called Pakistan, in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent.
That Indic syncretism, which Lahore has oozed with for centuries, is today introducing a new cuisine to the city’s taste buds: Philadelphian. But while Philly’s Steak Sandwich might be the first to put our city’s renowned sandwich on local billboards, Lahore’s love-in with the cheesesteak is, in fact, decades old…
More fission than fusion: “The Amazing Story of How Philly Cheesesteaks Became Huge in Lahore, Pakistan,” from @khuldune in @PhiladelphiaMag.
* “Montgomery Burns,” in The Simpsons
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As we muse on migration, we might recall that it was on this date in 1959 that the St. Lawrence Seaway opened. A system of locks, canals, and channels in Canada and the United States, it permits oceangoing vessels to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes of North America– as far inland as Duluth, Minnesota, at the western end of Lake Superior. The Seaway handles 40–50 million tons of cargo annually, about 50% of of which travels to and from international ports in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
“Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography”*…
There are lessons to be learned from history. Noah Smith cautions us to be sure that we’re learning the right ones…
… 2022 saw authoritarian powers suddenly on the back foot. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a military and geopolitical disaster, and Xi’s economic mismanagement brought China’s growth to a momentary halt. Meanwhile, the U.S. started looking a bit more politically stable and started to take action to preserve its remaining industrial advantages, Asian democracies like Japan and the fast-growing India continued to flex their muscle, and Europe seemed more united than it had in…well, ever. All of this naturally had some people in the West optimistic that Cold War 2 would ultimately end much like World War 2 and the first Cold War.
Unfortunately, early optimism can easily give way to complacency and cockiness. We’re still in the opening moves of Cold War 2, and the minor victories of 2022 are likely to revert to the mean. 2023 is already shaping up to be a year in which the authoritarian powers recalibrate their strategy and find their footing.
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Americans need to realize that Cold War 2 is fundamentally unlike Cold War 1 or World War 2. Those 20th century contests were ideological battles, where people fought and died for communism, fascism, and liberal democracy. But China is not an ideological, proselytizing power; its ideology, basically, is just “China.” Xi Jinping doesn’t care whether you have elections and protect civil rights or send minorities to the death camps, as long as you support Chinese hegemony abroad.
Cold War 2 is therefore a bit more like World War 1 — a naked contest of national power and interests. And if the U.S. tries to turn it into an ideological battle, it could backfire…
A provocative argument that we shouldn’t make too much of what are only the opening moves in “Cold War 2”: “2023 is when the empires strike back,” from @Noahpinion.
* Edward Said
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As we grapple with geopolitics, we might recall that it was on this date in 1975 that South Vietnamese forces withdrew from the town of Xuan Loc in the last major battle of the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese victory there occasioned the resignation of South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, who was replaced by Trần Văn Hương, who was ordered by the National Assembly to seek a negotiated peace with North Vietnam at any cost.
“The almighty dollar, that great object of universal devotion”*…
The reigning global financial regime, at the center of which sits the U.S. Dollar, was first formalized at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference. While the rules have evolved since then, the Dollar remains by far the world’s leading reserve currency and is routinely used to price/settle international transactions around the world.
While there are concerns in the U.S. that a strong dollar can hurt U.S. exports and costs jobs, high global demand for dollars allows the United States to borrow money at a lower cost and amplifies the power of its sanctions.
So recent talk of “the decline of the dollar” (c.f., e.g., here) has concerned many. Not to worry, Noah Smith suggests…
Saudi Arabia recently announced that it’s open to settling trade (i.e., oil sales) in currencies other than the U.S. dollar. This has provoked a fair amount of consternation about the potential end of dollar dominance. This fear has been intensified by all the Bitcoin people who are screaming that the banking system is going to collapse and that this is going to spell the end of the U.S. dollar.
In fact, people shouldn’t be concerned at all. I’ve written two posts — one last year and one this February — explaining why A) de-dollarization is extremely unlikely to happen anytime soon, and B) some degree of diversification away from the dollar would actually be good for the United States. Both posts were paywalled, but I decided to unpaywall them, so that everyone can enjoy the peace of mind of not having to worry about the death of the dollar…
Read them at “Unpaywalled: Two posts about de-dollarization,” from @Noahpinion.
Then contemplate this analysis (by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York) of the consequences of that continuity…
The importance of the U.S. dollar in the context of the international monetary system has been examined and studied extensively. In this post, we argue that the dollar is not only the dominant global currency but also a key variable affecting global economic conditions. We describe the mechanism through which the dollar acts as a procyclical force, generating what we dub the “Dollar’s Imperial Circle,” where swings in the dollar govern global macro developments…
Worth reading in full and pondering: “The Dollar’s Imperial Circle,” from @LibertyStEcon (a newsletter of @NewYorkFed).
* Washington Irving
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As we contemplate currency, we might spare a thought for Leonid Kantorovich; he died on this date in 1986. An economist and mathematician best known for his theory and development of techniques for the optimal allocation of resources, he is regarded as the founder of linear programming— for which he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1975.
“There’s nothing more political than food”*…
Zongyuan Zoe Liu on the growing issue of food security in China, and on what it might mean for geopolitics and geoeconomics…
…every day, China’s 1.4 billion people consume a staggering 700,000 tons of grain, 98,000 tons of edible oil, 1.92 million tons of vegetables, and 230,000 tons of meat. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) understand that “to the emperor, the people is heaven; to the people, food is heaven,” as the traditional saying goes, and they have prioritized food security as a prerequisite to maintaining power, especially after the calamitous famines of the Maoist era. For decades, coupons were necessary to buy any food—a system not fully ended until 1995, although largely dead in the cities by the mid-1980s. Despite China’s emergence as the world’s factory, the country’s No. 1 central document, the first policy statement issued by the top authorities each year, has centered on food security and the three issues of agriculture, the countryside, and farmers since 2004.
This year is no exception, as the Central Committee of the CCP and the State Council jointly released the highly anticipated No. 1 document for 2023 on Feb. 13. The document, which carries enormous weight, sets forth two critical priorities: safeguarding national food security and protecting farmland. While previous No.1 documents touched on these issues between 2004 and 2012, it was not until 2013, when Xi Jinping assumed leadership, that the annual No. 1 document established a consistent and resolute focus on food security and farmland preservation…
Xi is correct to recognize that preserving farmland is an indispensable factor in the quest to achieve food self-sufficiency. China has experienced alarming levels of farmland loss and deterioration in recent years. The most recent land use survey showed that China’s total arable land decreased from 334 million acres in 2013 to 316 million acres in 2019, a loss of more than 5 percent in just six years. Shockingly, more than one-third of China’s remaining arable land (660 million mu, a traditional unit of land measurement in China and equal to roughly 109 million acres, slightly larger than Montana) suffers from problems of degradation, acidification, and salinization.
The land has been eroding faster in recent years. The annual net decrease of arable land has risen from about 6 million mu (about 988,421 acres) from 1957 to 1996 to more than 11 million mu (about 1.8 million acres) from 2009 to 2019. This means that between 2009 and 2019, China lost farmland equal to about the size of South Carolina. China’s diminishing farmland is also losing productivity due to over-cultivation and excess use of fertilizers. China’s fertilizer usage in 2018 was 6.4 times that of 1978, but grain yield in 2018 was only 2.2 times that of 1978.
As in many other countries, such as the United States and India, a major cause for China’s farmland deterioration has been its land-intensive industrialization and urbanization over the past three decades. Farmland has been expropriated to meet the strong demand for land to support the expansion of manufacturing, infrastructure, and urban development. Competing interests for land use have resulted in arable land being expropriated for more lucrative development projects. In the contest for land use among food growers, cash-crop planters, and property developers, profit maximization often trumps the needs of food farmers, especially when imported foods are much cheaper than locally grown options.
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Over the past two years, Chinese private property developers such as Evergrande and Vanke have pulled back from aggressive land purchasing due to stringent restrictions. [See here.] While this reduced demand from private property developers should have helped alleviate the temptation to appropriate farmland for property development, much of the demand void has been filled by state-owned enterprises and government-backed developers or companies, such as local government financing vehicles (LGFVs)… Boosting land sales through government-owned or government-controlled entities when demand from private developers is low provides a politically convenient channel for local governments to raise revenue at limited costs.
Investing limited fiscal resources in farmland protection, in contrast, does not generate immediate political and financial returns, making it a tough sell for local officials who are under pressure to deliver a rapid economic recovery. While safeguarding farmland is an important cause in the long term, and one backed from the top in Beijing in theory, it costs money from the pockets of local governments and subsidies from the central authorities. For local officials, the more pressing challenge consuming their attention and resources is to restore economic growth…
Limited domestic farmland availability combined with the pursuit of food security dictates that China would expand its overseas farmland investment and advance its strategy of farming out. The 2007 No. 1 document set farming and agriculture “going out” into the rest of the world as a national strategy for the first time, but the focus back then was exports. The 2016 No.1 document updated guidelines on international agriculture cooperation, focusing on agricultural investment and supporting Chinese companies’ overseas operations.
According to Land Matrix, a European land-monitoring organization, Chinese companies have gained control of 6.48 million hectares (16 million acres) in foreign territories, which is nearly the size of Ireland. This number dwarfs the combined 1.56 million hectares controlled by British companies, the 860,000 hectares held by U.S. companies, and the 420,000 hectares owned by Japanese companies. Chinese investment in U.S. farmland has already triggered concerns in Washington, even though China currently only holds less than 1 percent of foreign-owned U.S. farmland. Republican lawmakers have already drafted a bill to ban Chinese purchases of American farmland, while in states like Texas measures are even more advanced. China not only owns farmland in the United States but also in U.S. allies’ territory, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Australia.
If China’s economic recovery and its continued growth are fueled by land sales and its property market, Xi’s prioritization of food security means Chinese entities will have to embark on more aggressive overseas land purchases. While the current theater of U.S.-China competition has been centered on the chips and semiconductors industry, a new front may emerge in the form of competition over farmland and agriculture technology. The party can survive setbacks in the chip war, but the stakes are much higher in the fight for food security. Failure on the food security front will threaten the survival of the regime…
The need to feed: “China’s Farmland Is in Serious Trouble,” from @ZongyuanZoeLiu in @ForeignPolicy.
* Anthony Bourdain
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As we contemplate comestibles, we might send tasty birthday greetings to Momofuku Ando; he was born on this date in 1910. A very successful businessman, he founded Nissin Food Products Co., Ltd., for which he invented instant noodles (ramen noodles) and created the Top Ramen and Cup Noodles brands.
Visit the Cup Noodles Museum.
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