Sitting on the seashore with Elisabeth Mann Borgese (1918-2002)
All of my life - except for a short year spent in continental exile in Ottawa - has been spent in close proximity to the sea. I have lived on three islands (four if you include Portsea), one peninsula, a tidal river, and an alluvial swamp. Three of the cities I have lived in - Portsmouth, Halifax (Nova Scotia), Limerick, and St. John's - owed their founding and original prosperity to their roles as safe harbours or ports. For a year my wife and I lived on Dogwood Cove (Nova Scotia) in a house on the Atlantic Ocean. The house belonged to Elisabeth Mann Borgese - an influential figure in law of the sea negotiations and a scholar focused on ocean governance. We were her dog sitters. Just like her scholarship, Borgese's home looked out to sea.
When we look at the globe in two dimensions the ocean covers 71% of its surface. When we go vertical, and add a third dimension, we find that 99% by volume of the world's space capable of supporting life is in the ocean. International Relations (IR) has been justly criticized for focusing too much on the North Atlantic world of Europe and North America - to the detriment of the global south - but IR's spatial problems go (quite literally) deeper than that. Where is the sea in IR?
Actually, there have been works on IR and the sea, especially in security studies, where Maritime security has been a subaltern presence since the 1990s. 2022 also saw the publication of a new edited collection on The Sea and International Relations. Yet, these excursions are recent, and Borgese beat them to it. Her turn to the ocean as a central part of global governance dates from at least 1967, when a chance letter on how the wealth of the oceans might be harnessed to fund the United Nations led her to ponder the place of the sea in international affairs. This turn to the ocean happened to coincide with the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III, 1967-82), and with Arvid Pardo's General Assembly speech on the sea as a common heritage of mankind.
An initial objection to my presentation of Borgese as a foundational thinker on the place of the ocean in IR is that the sea plays a role in early twentieth century geopolitics - the works of Ellen Churchill Semple, Halford Mackinder and A. T. Mahan spring to mind here. By and large, though, these geopolitical approaches remain bound by the concerns of terra firma. At best, they are amphibious theories of IR, where power originating on land is projected across oceans. The Sea remains a place of transit, and ultimately a means to a land-based end. Where Borgese is different is that she saw in the ocean a new paradigm for global governance that could replace the tired and failing paradigms associated with the land.
Borgese often began her discussion of the ocean with an exploration of its physical realities, because she saw in these the basis of a different way to think about politics. The sea, like the atmosphere, is fluid, interdependent and interconnected. It therefore stands in contrast to a solid land that lends itself to sovereignty, borders and to the institutions of the state. Applying this land-based logic to the oceans would be absurd. Yet, this is exactly what was threatened by technological developments that made economic exploitation of the oceans potentially viable. Here, though, Borgese saw an opportunity in this threat. For many of those interested in exploiting the resources of the sea, especially in the global north, the ocean represented a vast terra nullius (legally unoccupied, and therefore ripe to be claimed by the first that can use it). By contrast, Borgese supported the idea that the ocean was the common heritage of humanity, and thus (in part due to its fluid nature) could not be owned. Directly involved in the UNCLOS III negotiations, and supporting global south and landlocked country positions, Borgese was part of the process that built common heritage into the final document, and she regarded UNCLOS III as a bare-bones constitution for the ocean.
Yet, for Borgese building a governance regime for the ocean that suited the physical realities of the sea was only part of her agenda. She also saw the ocean, and the regime hammered out at UNCLOS III, as a template for a new form of fairer governance on land. It was not just the interdependence of the ocean that challenged the sovereign state and the primacy of borders, but also the fundamentally three-dimensional nature of the oceans. She was struck by how states saw the world in only two dimensions, and therefore saw the ocean as a two-dimensional sea floor. The form of the ocean forces us to realize that this floor is connected to a three-dimensional water column, and challenges two-dimensional thinking. Borgese saw this two-dimensional thinking as associated with imperialism, and the desire to apply to the seabed the same colonial mentality that the 'Eurocracy' had applied to the global south in the nineteenth century.
Building on her view of UNCLOS III as a constitution, she went further by arguing that there was now space for the development of functional organisations and links, based on the logic of UNCLOS III, that would spread to the land. Littoral regions, often abandoned by their governments and subject to the new rules of ocean governance, would act as incubators for new forms of governance that could spread to the rest of the land. At the same time, truths based on the solid and seemingly immovable logic of the land, such as borders and sovereignty, dissolved in the fluid world of the ocean. The more we interact with the ocean, the more we find challenges to terrestrial certainties.
For me, though, Borgese's work serves a further purpose. Despite an ethos within IR that the field should concern itself with the existential threats facing humanity, IR was singularly unprepared to deal with the emergence of the various environmental threats, including climate change, that increasingly seem to throw all other threats into the shade. By starting in the physical realities of the ocean, Borgese embedded her take on global governance in the realities of the environment. While this led her to see potential in the abundance of maritime resources, it also made her aware of the very real damage that land-based industrial society did to its ecology, whether oceanic, atmospheric or on land. In this sense, she is among a number of often forgotten scholars that represent forerunners of an IR for the Anthropocene. These are those who see human society as, in one form or another, embedded and interacting with its physical ecology. For Borgese the interaction that interested her was between human society and the ocean.
In this sense Borgese, and others like her, represent a challenge to the land-based canonical stories associated with IR theories since 1945. She did this by living on the borderlines of IR - or, probably more apt, living a littoral existence between the IR of the universities and the practice of international negotiations and organizations. In Borgese's case littoral living came naturally to her: as an émigré, as a scholar that did not fully fit into the university scholarly community, and as a resident of a house on the sea that was in a very literal sense littoral. More broadly speaking she shares a metaphorical littoral space on the edge of IR with other women of her generation. As the Leverhulme Project on Women and the History of International Thought has found, the position of women in IR often led them to live a littoral existence between scholarship and other pursuits. This both underscores the misogyny at the heart of IR theorising, and highlights one of the reasons that women scholar-practitioners often brought new perspectives to scholarship from the other worlds they inhabited. In a metaphorical sense, Borgese's story was no different from those of many women explored by the Leverhulme Project: an intellectual beachcomber bringing shoreline discoveries to a mainly masculine scholarly world built safely inland and out of sight of the sea.
References:
E. Borgese, 1998. The Oceanic Circle. Governing the Seas as a Global Resource. Tokyo: United Nations University Press.
T. Meyer, 2022. Elisabeth Mann Borgese and the Law of the Sea. Leiden: Brill.