Abstract
It is very likely that, by 2024, in the seas around Nauru, humankind's first deep-sea-mining operation will commence. Setting aside its environmental impact, the dredging of the seabed ends a vision that the high seas would be treated as ‘the common heritage of [hu]mankind’. Up until recently, to anybody who was desirous to understand how this came about I used to recommend Clyde Sanger's Ordering the Oceans. 1 Having just finished Tirza Meyer's recent study, Elisabeth Mann Borgese and the Law of the Sea, I now have a new book to recommend.
In her book, Meyer has deftly interwoven legal history with the study of an individual who helped shape that history. Moreover, by treating this historical figure as the embodiment of a specific visionary approach to the problem of order at sea, the book documents an eventful and tense encounter between a political idealist and the opacity of self-interested power politics. In other words, Meyer's account is not only academically grounded but also tells a story about dreams and disappointment.
The context is the Third United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III), which took place between 1973 and 1982. Specifically, Meyer's story takes place in the wrangle that occurred around the stretch of seabed that lies beyond national jurisdiction. In 1967, Arvid Pardo argued that deep-sea mining was an imminent prospect and that the wealth it promised ought to be evenly distributed with a measure of social justice. The resources on the seabed, he proposed, should be recognized as being ‘the common heritage of mankind’. The Convention had to decide whether the international seabed should be administered so that all states could enjoy equal and regulated access. At the other end of the spectrum, it was proposed that the seabed should be opened to the dominion of free market forces and to the doctrine of the freedom of the sea.
The problem for the chronicler is that most of the negotiations occurred behind closed doors; they were oral and unrecorded. The Convention was not minuted and the archive is therefore sparse. Meyer overcomes this by telling the story of the negotiations from the point of view of Elisabeth Mann Borgese. This perspective is mainly drawn from the Mann Borgese Archives, housed at Dalhousie University, and the Pardo Archives in the International Maritime Institute. This archive material is tightly integrated with the secondary literature and further supplemented by interviews and official documents.
The story of Mann Borgese's political, academic and diplomatic interactions with the Convention is revealed with patient detail. Adopting this perspectival approach to history, Meyer does not write from the centre of the United Nations negotiations. In fact, we are often barely in the room. This is history told through the eyes of an outsider, someone operating at the margins. In Meyer's account, Mann Borgese, always trying to get in, is resourceful and pragmatic – a woman surrounded by like-minded, but less resolute, men. Meyer also reveals large gaps in the historiography of UNCLOS. Indicatively, the book recounts numerous historical mysteries that remain unresolved to this day. The diplomat and symbol of the common-heritage principle, Arvid Pardo, is himself the most mysterious character of all.
The book is structured chronologically into four parts. The first (in time-lapse, according to Meyer) introduces us to Mann Borgese, daughter of Thomas Mann and wife of Giuseppe Antonio Borgese. She was a concert pianist, a secretary, later a magazine editor, a writer, a mother and a widow. With some empathy, Meyer outlines the wayward route taken by Mann Borgese, through tragedy and friendship, to arrive at her fate as an activist for global justice. This section of the book also introduces us to the influences that attract her to the problem surrounding the use of the seabed.
In the second part of the study, which takes us from 1967 to 1973, Meyer meticulously documents the agenda-setting and coalition-building strategies undertaken by Mann Borgese and Pardo in the years immediately prior to the Convention. In these pages, one gets a sense of the excitement of those early years, as plans are made, a think tank is established, papers are published, international conferences occur and draft treaties are drawn up. The book catalogues the ambitions behind these events, contextualizing them within the swirl of wider politics growing around the Convention. Meyer has also done a lot of research on the position of the Maltese government, which, in one of the many political mysteries we find in this story, dismissed Pardo as the head of its delegation to the Convention in 1971. Thus, Pardo was effectively removed from the proceedings before they ever commenced. Having dispensed with Pardo, Malta proceeded to scupper Mann Borgese. The book examines the hostility shown towards Mann Borgese's well-intentioned plans for Malta to host what would become the United Nations’ International Seabed Authority. The treatment of Pardo, and the retreat of Malta from the plan to establish his ‘ocean regime’, is investigated closely. In fact, the real strength of this book is its analysis of the international politics that shaped the Law of the Sea. Underneath the obvious tension between liberalism and realism, Mann Borgese's activism navigated tensions between colonial powers and post-colonial states, Cold War superpowers, small-island states, large-island states, short-coastline states, long-coastline states, landlocked countries, non-governmental organizations, mining corporations and so on.
The third section of the book covers the complex negotiations that occurred between all these interests from 1973 to 1982. It is historically significant that non-governmental organizations are admitted to the Convention. UNCLOS was a milestone for the emergence of non-state politics. Mann Borgese truly operated in uncharted waters. The book illustrates how she introduced a novel mode of legal activism to the male-dominated, state-centric, smoky chambers of diplomacy. Without really acknowledging it, Meyer's study locates a birthplace for a novel and inclusive type of non-state politics.
The final part is a coda to UNCLOS and to all the lives it shaped. Perhaps the negotiations went on too long. By the time the Law of the Sea was ratified, the heady idealism of the post-colonial 1960s had succumbed to the puritanical neo-liberalism of the late 1980s and 1990s. In her restrained style, Meyer points an accusatory finger at the United States for Ronald Reagan's hammer-handed approach to winning the argument. As a result, the International Seabed Authority today does not serve ‘the common heritage of [hu]mankind’ but the freedom of the most voracious. Meyer reminds us that we live in the common legacy of UNCLOS's achievements and failures, and, by extension, Elisabeth Mann Borgese's political defeat and the ultimate victory of her legacy.