Environment and Planning I): Society and Space 1999, volume 17, pages 403 426

The maritime mystique: sustainable development, capital mobility, and nostalgia in the world ocean

Philip E Steinberg Department of Geography, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2190, USA; e-mail: psteinbe@coss.fsu.edu Received 30 January 1997; in revised form 28 October 1998

Abstract, Three images of ocean space are becoming increasingly prevalent in policy and planning circles and popular culture: The image of the ocean as an empty void to be annihilated by hyper-mobile capital; as a resource-rich but fragile space requiring rational management for sustainable development; and as a source of consumable spectacles. In this paper I locate the emergence of these three apparently contradictory images of the ocean within structural contradictions in the spatiality of capitalism, which, in turn, are precipitating a crisis in marine regulation. To analyze these contradic­tions, I begin with a historical study of industrial-era marine uses, regulations, and representations. This is followed by an analysis of the present crisis and its associated representational discourses. I conclude with a call for analyses of ocean space that probe beneath marine imagery so as to explore the regulatory crises and social conflicts that underlie marine-policy debates and that reveal the ocean's potential as a site of social transformation.

Introduction: Three images of ocean space In December of 1994, the General Assembly of the United Nations designated 1998 the International Year of the Ocean (United Nations General Assembly, 1994b), "providing] a window of opportunity for governments, organizations and individuals to become aware of the ocean situation and to consider the actions needed to undertake our common responsibility to sustain the greatest common heritage we have and without which we cannot exist" (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, 1997a). Build­ing upon the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the International Year of the Ocean (IYO)(l) was designed to place the world ocean within the discourse of sustainable development, a discourse that others have noted is devoted to the rational management of scarce resources so that nature can continue to serve as a material base for capital accumulation well into the twenty-first century (O'Connor, 1994). As the statement of objectives for the International Year of the Ocean reads, in its entirety:

"The overall objective is to focus and reinforce the attention of the public, govern­ments and decision makers at large on the importance of the oceans and the marine environment as resources for sustainable development. The major aim of the joint efforts during 1998 will be to create awareness and obtain commitments from governments to take action, provide adequate resources and give the priority to the ocean and coastal areas which they deserve as finite economical assets. This is most important in view of the increasing threats of pollution, population pressure, excessive fishing, coastal zone degradation and climate variability to the finite

(1) The IYO and affiliated programs involve a host of United Nations agencies and private foundations. Lead coordination is provided by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), a unit of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Official information on the IYO and related programs and agencies may be found at the web site, http://ioc.unesco.org/iyo. Many of the public education activities associated with the IYO are being coordinated by an organization called OCEAN98, a cooperative project of the IOC and the Water Branch of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) (http://www.ocean98.org).

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resource the ocean represents. Without a healthy ocean, the life-supporting system of the earth would be seriously endangered" (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, 1997b; emphasis added).

An IYO planning document leaves little doubt about the overall orientation of the Year of the Ocean toward what Esteva (1992) calls "the reign of scarcity": "Finite size must be emphasized" in all IYO activities and publications (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, 1997a).

This application of the sustainable development discourse to the ocean at the inter­governmental level has been supported by representations of the ocean in the popular media. In 1995 alone, two major US publications, Time and National Geographic, featured cover stories celebrating the ocean as a resource-rich but fragile environment (Lemonick, 1995; Parfit, 1995). Time tells an optimistic story: The sea is a frontier replete with opportunity, at last capable of being 'conquered'. National Geographic tells a more pessimistic story: The sea is an endangered environment wherein new technologies both respond to and reproduce scarcity (figure 1). Both stories, however, place the sea within a discourse of sustainable development similar to that constructed by the promoters of the IYO: As the sea is a space of "finite economical assets," the commodiflcation of its environment should be guided by long-run planning for maximum efficiency and productivity. Similarly, a 1998 supplement to The Economist celebrates the ocean as a multiple-use space, but one in which certain uses are likely to crowd out others and destroy the ocean environment unless we "take stewardship of the ocean, with all the privileges and responsibilities that implies" (The Economist 1998, page 18). Also asso­ciated with these efforts to promote investment in the sustained exploitation of the ocean's riches is a general campaign for what Leddy (1996) calls the 'Cousteauization' of

Figure 1. National Geographic, 1995. The ocean is represented as a site rich with exploitable resources but in need of rational management (reprinted by permission of the National Geographic Society, Washington, DQ.

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the oceans, a popular movement to cultivate public interest in the ocean's biota with the effect of generating support for further marine research and for governmental and/or corporate stewardship of marine resources, In the USA, perhaps the most visible spokesperson for this movement has been publicist/authof/burcaucrat/oceanographcr Sylvia Earle, supported by a marine research and development military-industrial complex represented by individuals such as computer entrepreneur and former US Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard and retired Admiral James Watkins, a former US Chief of Naval Operations and US Secretary of Energy who presently heads the Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education (Broad, 1997).

The rise of the sustainable development discourse, however, is only one component of a multifacctcd shift in our perception, use, and regulation of ocean space. Even as this image of the ocean as a space of resources has gained popularity, other images have also been ascendant. Contrasting with the image of the ocean as a cornucopia of exploitable resources, cultural products such as the film Waterworld and the television program Sea Quest have depicted the sea as a distinctly resource-free space, an empty surface across which and through which people move in search of adventure. In Water-world (1995), for instance, the ocean is devoid of nature; the weather is always good, the sea is always calm, and, with only one highly denaturalised exception, there is no evidence of fish or other marine life. The sea docs not even provide the resource of water; drinking water is obtained not by desalinating seawater but by purifying urine.

This Hollywood representation of the sea complements a corporate imagery in which the sea is portrayed as an empty space across which capital flows with increasing case as it seeks out profit-generating opportunities on land. Thus, the geocconomic region known as the Pacific Rim is notable for its imagery of discrete, deccntered units (nation - states, world cities, sweatshops, etc) revolving around a space of (marine) emptiness: "The hegemonic construction of a Pascalian sublime whose 'circumference is everywhere and center nowhere'... [characterized by] the dcterritorializing power of oceanic vastness" (Wilson and Dirlik, 1995, page 1), "a perfect image for a centeredness with no central power" (Connery, 1995, page 34; see also Dirlik, 1993). For the corporate practitioner of capitalist globalization, the ocean that binds the rim (and, more generally, the space of the world economy) is an unprofitable nuisance space to be progressively annihilated by capital in its search for complete freedom of movement and the conquest of distance. Corporate advertisements take this representation of the ocean to fantastic excess; in a 1990 Merrill Lynch advertisement a panoramic photograph of the ocean is accompanied by the caption, "For us, this doesn't exit" (reproduced in Roberts, 1996), and in a 1997 advertisement the telecommunications firm Concert envisions a 'global village' wherein the world has been impacted by a fortuitous act of tectonic convergence in which the continents have been squeezed together, eliminating practically all inter­vening ocean space (figure 2). AT&T similarly advertises its international service with a slogan celebrating its ability to annihilate the marine divide: "Oceans separate. And we connect" (cited in Carvajal, 1995).

Concurrent with these two images of the sea—the ocean as a space of sustainable development, and as a space of flows to be crossed and annihilated in pursuit of investment sites—there is a third image of the sea: the ocean as a site of past glory and culture. This representation can be seen in the proliferation of harborside devel­opments commemorating maritime history through festival marketplaces, high-income housing, and maritime museums. From Boston and Baltimore, home of the prototypes of these developments, to Cape Town, Sydney, and countless other sites, port-city urban renewal projects feature maritime references (figure 3). This trend is complemented by cities such as Bristol and Lisbon, which have recently celebrated their maritime heritage through festivals and expositions oriented to tourists from around the world

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Figure 2. Concert advertisement, 1997. A telecommunications firm idealizes the annihilation of ocean space (reprinted by permission of Concert Communications Services, Reston, VA).

Figure 3. South Street Seaport, New York City. Historical maritime images provided an atmosphere for retail commodity consumption (photograph by Emily Clark, New York).

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(Atkinson et at, 1997; Atkinson and Laurier, 1998; DeFilippis, 1997; Goss, 1996; Kilian and Dodson, 1995; 1996). More, the sea is referenced as a crucial source for folk culture and past economic glory, but the role of the ocean in contemporary political economy is reduced to that of a provider of images to be consumed: "The old harbor front, its links to a common culture shattered by unemployment, is now reclaimed for a bourgeois reverie on the mercantilist past" (Sekula, 1995, page 12),

Thus, we are presently encountering three images of ocean space that apparently contradict each other: the ocean as a resource-rich (but fragile) arena for sustainable development, as an (ideally) empty space facilitating friction-free movement of capital, and as a space that is materially irrelevant but whose image provides 'historical' grounding for postindustrial cities. These reflect the material agendas of competing interest groups who invoke these images to support different systems for regulating the marine environment, My aim in this paper is to make sense of these intensifying ways in which we use and represent the world ocean and debate its regulation.

These different regulatory strategics are centrally related to the intensification of a single tension within the spatial organization of society, the tension between capital's contradictory needs for fixity in discrete locations and for mobility across space. This tension has been discussed extensively with regard to land space, most notably by Harvey (1982), but I seek to extend the analysis to the world ocean. Key to this argument is that ocean space, like land space, is an integral component of society, transformed amidst the dynamics of the world economy (Steinberg, 1998; 1999). The social processes that shape the ocean arc linked to those that operate on land, but the actual constructions that have emerged from these contradictions in ocean space have been specific owing to the sea's unique physical properties, most significantly its unsuitability for the placement of spatially fixed investments. In recent decades, new opportunities have emerged for utilizing the sea, and the old order of the oceans has proven insufficient for serving the needs of various ocean users. Thus, it is argued below that the world ocean is presently undergoing a crisis of regulation. Ocean uses associated with capital fixity and those associated with capital mobility are both intensifying and spreading out across ocean space, to the point that the two groups of uses increasingly overlap. Regulatory regimes and institutions that support one set of uses are fundamentally incompatible with those that support the other set of uses. The ocean has emerged as a site of conflict, as is reflected in the multiple images of marine space outlined above.

To investigate this conflict and its bases in the dynamic spatiality of capitalism, I explore how various capital interests have emerged over time to utilize ocean space and construct competing marine regulatory regimes and representations. The remainder of this paper consists of four parts. In the first part, I explore the foundations of the industrial-era ocean space regime by tracing its origins from the days of mercantilism through the present, and emphasize how transformations in the regime have paralleled shifts in the spatiality of world capitalist organization. In the second part, I revisit the latter part of this history, and concentrate on the sea as a space of emergent opportuni­ties for placing spatially fixed investments. Also in this part I detail the present crisis in ocean-space regulation that is resulting from the ocean's multiple functions. In partic­ular, I focus on the contentious debate over manganese nodule mining that absorbed much of the United Nations' deliberations over the Law of the Sea from the late 1960s through the mid-1990s. In the third part, I return to the three images of the ocean discussed in this introduction, and demonstrate how each reflects one or another component of the present crisis in the regulation of ocean space. In the fourth part, I conclude by asserting that these images divert attention from ongoing social conflicts

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and from broader questions concerning the role of ocean space as an arena where social power is expressed and contested.

The historical geography of ocean space: A tale of capital mobility Modern-era representations and regulations of ocean space are particular to our society and have their origins in underlying social structures and uses of the sea. As a point of departure, modern regimes governing the ocean can be compared with those of nonmodern societies (Steinberg, 1996b), ranging from the societies of Oceania, where the sea was governed like land as an integral space of society (Jackson, 1995; Nakayama and Ramp, 1974), to those of the Indian Ocean, where the sea was constructed as a zone so external to land-based society that the ships of states warring on land ceased being adversaries when they encountered one another at sea (Anand, 1983; Braudel, 1984; Chaudhuri, 1985).

Set against this broad spectrum of possible systems for ocean governance, the event usually heralded as the beginning of the modern ocean-space regime—the early seven­teenth century 'Battle of the Books' between Grotius (1916) and Selden (1972)—is revealed as a relatively narrow debate wherein all parties argued for modifications of preexisting European ocean-space traditions in an effort to craft a governance system appropriate for the emergent era of merchant capitalism (Anand, 1983; Steinberg, 1996a, pages 186-200). Although Grotius and Selden are typically portrayed as polar opposites, the former advocating freedom of the seas and the latter advocating enclo­sure (see O'Connell, 1982, page 1 -14), both authors shared a common basis in the legal principle of imperium that had guided Roman control of the Mediterranean (Fenn, 1925; Gormley, 1963; Lobingier, 1935; O'Connell, 1982, pages 14-20). According to this doctrine, the ocean is immune to incorporation within the territory of any individual state, but, as an essential space of society, it is perceived as a legitimate arena for exertions of power by land-based state entities.

This Early Modern ocean-space regime was particularly well suited to the spatiality of the era's mercantilist political economy. On the one hand, the interstate political-economic system was (and remains) dependent upon competition among multiple sovereign states (Chase-Dunn, 1989; Wallerstein, 1984). The transformation of world hegemony into one global world empire would have stifled the political competition that drove (and continues to drive) capitalism's search for ever-increasing accumula­tion. On the other hand, during this early era of capitalism there were few domains in which sovereign states could actually compete with each other for economic domi­nance. High-risk investments in the mainstays of mercantilist political economy—over­seas agriculture, mineral extraction, and the carriage trade—generally would have run at a loss if mediated solely by a 'depoliticized' free-enterprise market (Andrews, 1984; Braudel, 1982; Davis, 1962) and there were few opportunities for profits to be realized from investment in European production sites (Dunford and Perrons, 1983). However, rising European powers soon discovered that by applying state violence they could claim exclusive rights to the products of distant areas and gain monopolistic control over long-distance trade routes, and this served as a crucial means for generating capital accumulation (Chaudhuri, 1985; Davis, 1962; Nijman, 1994).

Analyzing these factors, Bunker and Ciccantell (1995; forthcoming) have suggested that the one distinct characteristic of this early period of capitalism was that the primary means for capital accumulation was control of trade, or channeled circulation, and they have suggested that the era be renamed the age of transport capitalism. It follows that in a system in which economic power was based upon controlling discrete channels of trade, the surface upon which much of this trade was carried out (the ocean) would emerge as a site for exercising power and implementing state violence.

The maritime mystique <«)<)

Thus, the control of trade routes rapidly became conflated with political domination and military might, and the deep seas became constructed as a 'force-field' for exercis­ing these forms of power (Mollat du Jourdin, 1993), and innovations in the means for crossing its expanse were among the driving forces in modern technological progress (HugilU 1993).

Even as the sea became an essential arena for the gathering and expression of social power, nascent international law clearly placed the ocean outside the realm of state territoriality. Incorporation of ocean space within the borders of the state could interfere with its function as a circulation surface, and during this era circulation was the dominant means by which states accumulated wealth. Thus, although the 1493 Papal Bull and the 1494 Treaty of Tordcsillas are often described as dividing the seas between Spain and Portugal (sec Gold, 1981, page 35; Grotius, 1916, pages 37-38), a careful reading reveals that these documents were specifically worded to avoid any implication that the seas were to be partitioned. Rather, each state was granted exclusive policing powers in its respective region of the sea (Steinberg, 1996a, page 176- 183). By con­structing the ocean as a space where states competed for influence and use, but not for outright possession, the mercantilist-era ocean-space regime preserved both the inter­state competition and the channeled circulation that were essential attributes of the era's political-economic system.

With the Industrial Revolution of the mid-eighteenth century, the spatiality of capitalism underwent a transformation, as did the social perception and regulation of the sea. Although the dominant use of the sea—transportation of commodities across its surface—remained constant with the previous era, its perceived significance in the context of political economy changed markedly. At the root of this transformation in political economy were a host of new opportunities for investing in land space. Following from these opportunities, the industrial era's rationalist 'development discourse'justified the reification of developable places and denigrated the spaces between. According to the discourse, all societies were to 'develop' themselves by identifying what they produced best and directing investment toward production of that good. Through the application of reason to investment decisions, a society could progress (Sachs, 1992; Watts, 1993). Development was to occur in 'territories'—units of land space that could be bounded, governed, planned for, and 'emptied'and 'filled'according to generalizablc rules of profit maximization (Sack, 1986; Steinberg, 1994). The development of a place—through the rational application of spatially fixed investments—was equated with enlightenment, progress, and civilization.

Capital circulation remained an important aspect of political economy during this era, but, at least in the popular imagination, fixity and development replaced it as the essential activities of economic life. Gold's account of the lack of attention given to trade at the Congress of Vienna (1815) exemplifies how, during the industrial era, little formal attention was given to capital mobility, or, more specifically, to the ocean as a space of capital circulation:

"For most European countries, commerce was no longer 'fashionable' nor something on which great amounts of energy needed to be expended. Commerce was considered to be sufficiently self-motivated and self-perpetuating that whatever loose regulation it needed could be supplied by lesser government bodies. As long as commerce could provide a convenient tax base for government ambitions, necessary employment for the expanding population, and new markets for imports and exports, it was left to its own devices. Ocean transportation, as a part of the commercial structure, fitted well into this laissez-faire philosophy" (Gold, 1981, page 80). Thus the ocean became discursively constructed as removed from society and the

terrestrial places of progress, civilization, and development. Movement across spaces

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that resisted development, although necessary, was rhetorically defined as a subordinate activity outside social organization. The ocean was to serve capitalism as an empty space across which the free trade of liberal capitalist fantasy could transpire without hindrance from natural or social obstacles. As an 'other' space, the ocean was con­structed not so much as a space within which power could be deployed (as it had been during the mercantilist era, when control of channeled circulation was an essential component in garnering social power) but as an empty space across which power could be projected (Latour, 1986; Law, 1986).<2>

Evidence of this abstraction of ocean space during the industrial era can be observed in both the regulatory and representational spheres. When regulations were required for certain maritime activities, such as shipping or piracy, policymakers continued the mercantilist-era practice of avoiding territorial control by sovereign states. However, unlike in the previous era, the sea was now also discursively constructed as a subordi­nate arena beyond the social practice of formal interstate competition. In the case of shipping, states largely abandoned global shipping regulation, leaving the industry to govern itself and, in some cases, effectively giving national industry associations the authority to negotiate international treaties (Gold, 1981). Recognizing shipping's dependence on the maintenance of an indivisible ocean, hegemonic players developed a series of regulations and institutions that reflected their diverse interests and their desire for systemic stability rather than promoting regimes crudely calculated to multi­ply their social power and maximize short-term accumulation of economic rents (Cafruny, 1987).

A somewhat different route was taken with regard to piracy, but here too regulation in ocean space was crafted so as to define the ocean as a space beyond state competi­tion (Thomson, 1994). Ships not flying a national flag—that is, ships not claiming allegiance and rootedness in one of the civilised 'places' of the land—were declared to be of the wild, of the anticivilization of the sea. They were defined in international law as hostis humani generis (the enemy of humankind), a designation that transcended the division of land space into sovereign states and left pirate ships legitimate prey for ships of all land-based 'civilized' nations. The axis of social power enabling regulation of piracy in ocean space was thus scripted as a 'free-for-all' between the forces of land space and ocean space rather than a structured, intrasystemic competition among land powers seeking riches from assertions of social power in the sea.

In representation, there was similarly a complex set of continuities and disconti­nuities with the mercantilist era. In general, the significance of marine space was diminished; once perceived as an arena for one of the economy's essential activities (the movement of goods across space), the ocean was now reduced to an in-between space that separated the terrestrial places of development. This shift in perception of the ocean can be observed in its representation on navigational charts and other maps of the era. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, maps portrayed an ocean cluttered with ships, sea monsters, and rhumb lines, all of which were intended to portray the complex 'reality' of a space rich with natural and social features. By the early eighteenth century, however, the ocean was perceived as a space unworthy of social (2) In an apparent exception to this trend, military rhetoric during this period continued to portray the ocean as a contested force field in which military power was extended (see, for example, Mahan, 1890). However, studies of the British and US navies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reveal that, this rhetoric notwithstanding, their energies were directed not toward control of the sea (nor of channeled circulation on its surface) but rather toward projection of power across its expanse to distant land space (Baer, 1994; Bartlett, 1963; Kennedy, 1976; Stevens and Wescott, 1942). It was only in 1992 that the United States Navy formally acknowledged that its primary mission was the projection of power from the sea rather than its deployment in the sea (United States Navy, 1992).

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interest (Whitfield, 1996), Cartographers reduced the ocean to an empty, blue expanse, at most punctuated by placeless latitude and longitude coordinates and often—as in Lewis Carroll's parody—as "a perfect and absolute blank" (Carroll, 1973, page 115).

Although this representation of the ocean as empty and featureless dominated the era, there was an alternate, romantic representation as well. As a component of their search for alternatives to modern terrestrial society, nineteenth and twentieth century romantics seized upon the sea as a space beyond social norms and celebrated it for having a nature incapable of being tamed by the forces of modernity. Despite their contrasting depiction of the nature of ocean space, the romantics' representation also had its origins in the industrial era's construction of the sea as a space beyond society. The romantics, like the drafters of the antipiracy codes, identified the sea as a wild *other' but they honored it as a space to be respected and, in some instances, idealized rather than vilified.

This romantic perspective on ocean space is particularly evident in marine art and literature of the era. Whereas earlier marine artists had concentrated on detailed portraits of ships, elements of civilization that happened to reside in ocean space, nineteenth-century romantics such as Winslow Homer and J M W Turner turned their attention away from ships and toward the ocean itself, portraying the marine world as a space of brilliant hues and sublime terror that contrasted with the tamed spaces of civilization (Cordingly, 1973; Gaunt, 1975). In literature, as well, the sea came to be represented as the antithesis of modern, developable land space, as a romantic space of prcmodcrn Christian morality (see, for example, Samuel Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner), or mon­archical hierarchy (several of Joseph Conrad's novels), or anarchic escape (Jules Verne's 20000 Leagues Under the Sea) (Raban, 1992). Responding to and reproducing these representations, urbanites began to vacation at seaside resorts where the proximity of the marine wild suggested escape from the moral codes of modern civilization (Corbin, 1994; Urry, 1990).

The resurgence of capital fixity and the contemporary crisis in ocean-space governance Any history of the ocean told simply as a narrative of changes in the social regulation of capital mobility is necessarily partial. Capitalism does not survive simply by moving capital about; it also must continually find (or invent) locations for placing fixed investments (Harvey, 1982), and the sea has not been insulated from this half of capitalism's spatial dialectic any more than it has been insulated from mobility. As the sea emerged as an arena for locating spatially fixed capital investments, a series of marine regulatory innovations were implemented. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) these regulations, conflicts arose between aspects of the ocean-space regime facilitating capital mobility and those facilitating capital fixity, which precipitated the marine regulatory crisis of the late twentieth century.

Until recently, opportunities for generating profits from the extraction of resources at discrete points in ocean space occurred, with few exceptions, in coastal waters. In order to cope with increasingly intense use of coastal waters as a source of living and nonliving resources and with increasingly intense use of the deep seas as transportation space through which the movement of commodities could facilitate capital accumula­tion, a corpus of international law developed that divided the oceans into two distinct regions. Already by 1840 jurists had developed a clear legal distinction between coastal and noncoastal waters (Anand, 1983, page 137; O'Connell, 1982, pages 19—20) and by 1900 the coastal zone was indisputably recognized as a component of the sovereign terri­tory of the nation-state (O'Connell, 1982, pages 60-298). These juridical innovations enabled states to provide whatever territorial control was deemed necessary to regulate the rational implementation of development initiatives and guarantee the security of spatially fixed investments in discrete coastal sites where fishing and mineral extraction

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activities were being undertaken. In the few instances where regulations were needed for resource extraction in the deep seas, multilateral, and usually species-specific, con­ventions were adopted (Colombos, 1967, pages 401-423). Although these noncoastal conventions often referred to specific regions of the ocean, they never contained the exclu­sionary or enforcement provisions that Sack (1986) identifies as essential components of territorial control and that would be required before investors could be guaranteed the right to collect on spatially immobile investments.

Thus, the industrial capitalist-era ocean-space regime sought to facilitate both of capitalism's contradictory spatial tendencies—the tendency toward movement (which is facilitated by the absence of social barriers) and the tendency toward fixity (which is facilitated by territorial regulation). To support both tendencies, a 'spatial fix' of a sort was implemented. The oceans were geographically partitioned: the deep seas were constructed as an asocial nature-less void within which capital could move without hindrance, whereas a narrow coastal zone was designated as a site of fixity and devel­opment wherein the territorial state could protect investments and restrict access.

Like the terrestrial 'spatial fix' discussed by Harvey (1982) and Smith (1990), the one implemented in the ocean during this era merely covered underlying contradictions. Cracks in the dual-zone regime began to emerge as early as 1930, when participants at the League of Nations Conference for the Codification of International Law were unable to develop a standard definition for the breadth of the coastal zone (Anand, 1983, page 141). Additionally, around this same time, advances in fishing technology made the exhaustion of deep-sea fish stocks a real possibility. The 1930s witnessed a number of fishing disputes, in particular between the United States and Japan over North Atlantic salmon fisheries (Anand, 1983, pages 162-163; Gold, 1981, page 248; Watt, 1979). Heavily capitalized, distant-water fishing fleets began to threaten the combination of a minimalist 'high seas' regime and nonbinding multilateral production limitations that had previously governed deep-sea fishing.

Concurrently, in 1937, the first commercial off-shore oil well was sunk in five meters of water, two kilometers off the coast of Louisiana. Within a few years, offshore drilling technology had advanced to the point where petroleum extraction could be undertaken in depths far greater than five meters and in waters beyond the limit of three nautical-miles (5.5 kilometers) which at the time was accepted by most countries as the outer boundary of territorial waters (Gold, 1981, page 251). This opportunity for spatially fixed investments outside the narrow coastal zone posed an additional threat to the strict dichotomy between land-like territorial waters and nonterritorial deep seas.

These contradictions in the industrial capitalist-era ocean-space regime intensified after the Second World War. The United States, in part responding to difficulties that it had encountered obtaining petroleum during the war, issued the Truman Proclama­tions of 1945 (United States, 1945a; 1945b). With these statements, the USA claimed limited national rights to living resources in the waters above the continental shelf adjacent to the US coastline and to the shelf's mineral resources (Watt, 1979). Follow­ing these proclamations, several other countries, primarily in Latin America, declared rights to waters beyond the three-nautical mile limit that had previously prevailed. These declarations ranged from ones that, like the USA, implied exclusive resource rights but not full inclusion within the sovereign territory of the state, to more extreme claims, such as that of El Salvador, which wrote into its Constitution of 1950, "The territory of the Republic ... includes the adjacent seas to a distance of 200 sea miles from low water line and the corresponding airspace, subsoil and continental shelf" (cited in Extavour, 1979).

Following these increasingly expansive territorial claims, the international com­munity sought a compromise that would retain the previous 'spatial fix' dividing the

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sea into a territorially governed coastal zone for fixed investment and resource extraction and a non-tcrritorially governed deep sea dedicated to facilitating capilal circulation. Attempts at the First and Second United Nations Conferences on the Law of the Sea, held in 1958 and I960, were unsuccessful, but eventually a compromise was reached at the Third Conference (UNCLOS III) (1973 -1982). The Convention on the Law of the Sea established at UNCLOS III set a limit of 12 nautical miles to the breadth of territorial waters and established national Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) in waters between 12 and 200 nautical miles from a state's coast, or out to the limits of the continental shelf (United Nations, 1982). To ensure that this creeping enclosure movement would not interfere with the ocean's function as a surface for the movement of capital, the 1982 Convention held that high seas freedoms of navigation would apply both in the EEZs and in any international strait fewer than 24 nautical miles wide and therefore lying entirely within territorial waters.

Notwithstanding the compromise reached at UNCLOS III, it seems unlikely that this latest iteration of the industrial capitalist dual-zone regulatory regime will be more durable than any of its predecessors. Even before ratification of the 1982 Law of the Sea was complete, the United Nations was convening a Conference on the Conserva­tion and Management of Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks, where some states were proposing the establishment of a framework for managing select areas of the sea outside EEZs in order to prevent dcepwater fishing states from taking more than their 'fair share' of fish species that migrated among EEZs or between an EEZ and the high seas (Armas Pfirter, 1995; Orrcgo Vicuna, 1993). In response to such conflicts, ocean-policy professionals have promoted a number of further modifications of the existing regime. They advocate that specific uses and resources of the world ocean beyond the EEZs (but not the waters themselves) should be governed by a system granting management rights to individual adjacent coastal states (Ball, 1996), by a system giving authority over uses of regional seas to councils of regional states (Juda and Burroughs, 1990), or by a proliferation of nonspatial single-use single-species conventions (Friedheim, 1993). Each of these proposals represents a further attempt to facilitate governance of ocean resources while preserving the essen­tial character of the deep sea as a friction-free transportation surface immune from state territoriality.

The prospects for these variations on the traditional 'spatial fix' do not appear good. Even if opportunities for fixed investments fail to emerge in the deep seas, it remains questionable whether these nonterritorial regimes will be able to mediate the ever-expanding number of potentially competing demands made on ocean space and its resources (Couper, 1989). And, if a deep-sea ocean use were to emerge requiring stationary investments, it is doubtful that any of these regimes would provide the security of tenure necessary for investor confidence.

Beyond this dual-regime 'spatial fix' two other 'fixes' have been proposed. These solu­tions might more appropriately be termed 'social fixes'; although they would constitute changes in ordering space, they also would mandate substantial social change, and thus disturb the global political-economic system. The first of these options has been termed the 'national lakes' approach, in which each state's territorial waters would be expanded until it abutted the waters of another state, eliminating any 'commons' in between. The US State Department has projected what such a map of the world might look like, and Zacher and McConnell (1990) have calculated that—given the relative strengths and interests of various state actors in international competition—this is not an inconceivable scenario. Nonetheless, it would directly contradict the current 'great void'construction of the deep sea and could potentially establish major obstacles to the relatively friction-free maritime transportation of commodities on which so much of the world economy

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is dependent. Indeed, since the Second World War, each time the USA has taken a strong interest in intensifying ocean governance at the global scale or in the areas adjacent to its territorial waters, it has taken pains to distance itself from proposals supporting increased territorial enclosure that might endanger the high seas shipping and military regimes that underpin US hegemony (Baer, 1994; Cafruny, 1987; Sullivan, 1985).<3>

The second social fix proposed by the world community has been the 'common heritage' option. This proposal emerged in the 1960s, when it became likely that man­ganese nodules—deposits of manganese, nickel, cobalt, and copper lying on the ocean floor beyond the continental shelf—would soon become a commercially viable source of minerals. Mining the nodules would involve huge investments in large discrete areas of the ocean floor. By most estimates, prior to mining, an enterprise would have to prospect a site at least 30000 km2 in area and then spend up to two billion dollars custom-designing mining and processing equipment for the minerals of that specific site (United Nations, 1987; 1989). It was recognized that enterprises, whether state-run or private, would require some sort of territorial governance system before 'sinking' this magnitude of capital in a portion of the ocean, but the world's powers were loathe to sanction any system that might imply the beginning of national enclosure of the deep seas. As an alternative, the United States suggested in 1966 that the seabed and its resources be declared "the legacy of all human beings" (Johnson, 1966, page 930), a phrase that was reworded as "the common heritage of all mankind" when Ambassador Arvid Pardo of Malta formally proposed this designation at the meeting of the UN General Assembly the following year (Pardo, 1967, page 1). Shortly thereafter, UNCLOS III began meeting to consider—among other issues—a proposal for seabed mining to be carried out under a UN-administered permitting system, with a percentage of revenues returned to the United Nations for global distribution to developing countries and/or to mineral-producing states likely to lose revenues owing to competition from enterprises operating in global space.

Third World states, recognizing the symbolic value of a commodifiable resource for the first time being designated as global property, proposed that the seabed be an opening wedge for the New International Economic Order (NIEO) (Pardo and Borgese, 1975). Lauding the radical nature of this initiative, Robles notes,

"For its advocates, the introduction of the common heritage principle ... offered the opportunity to transform not only the traditional law of the sea but also the tradi­tional international law deemed inadequate to meet the needs of the majority of states and of humanity" (Robles, 1996, page 70).

To translate this 'common heritage' principle into a vehicle for social change, Third World negotiators proposed that production from the international seabed be carried out by a UN production company, operating in a globally governed territory, with technology and (at least initially) capital provided by the developed states. This pro­posal fundamentally challenged capitalist assertions of the sanctity of production by competitive entities, mediated only by the system of multiple sovereign states that territorially governed the spaces of production. Despite reservations about the anti-capitalist nature of this proposal, the USA and its allies (as well as the Soviet Union) were eager to codify other components of the Law of the Sea—namely, provisions

(3) The 'national lakes' scenario would be plausible if the sea's transportation functions were shifted to other domains (namely inner- and outer-atmospheric airspace). In this case, the sea could increasingly become land-like, capable of being possessed, governed, and exploited under the protection of sovereign territorial states. This development remains hypothetically possible, but improbable given current technologies and transportation price differentials that favor move­ment by sea over airborne transport.

The maritime mystique 415

limiting territorial sens to 12 nautical miles and guaranteeing free transit through international straits (Comptroller General 1975)—and so they agreed to it compromise proposal whereby mining was to be carried out in some areas by private and state firms in spaces permitted to them by the UN's International Seabed Authority and in other areas by the Authority's own production company (Frckihcim, 1993; Sanger, 1987; Van Dyke, 1985).

As events transpired, this innovative regime never came to fruition, By the time the Convention was ready for signature in 1982, metal prices had dropped, thus diminishing interest in commercial mining of the nodules (Shusterich, 1982). Also, the accession of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations heightened the West's opposition to any regime that challenged the sanctity of frcc-cntcrprisc capitalism (Burke and Brokaw, 1983; Goldwin, 1983). The United States and many of its allies refused to sign the Convention and further research on seabed mining came to a near standstill. By 1994, when the Convention received its sixtieth ratification and was about to become international law, conditions had changed further. Metal prices remained low, and the end of the Cold War resulted in the NIEO losing an important (if sometimes lukewarm) proponent in the Soviet Union. Geopolitical changes also intensified the US Navy's concern with achiev­ing universal ratification of the Convention so as to guarantee high seas freedoms (Galdorisi, 1995a; 1995b; Schachtc, 1993). Additionally, similar metal concentrations were discovered inside EEZs, where they could be mined at less expense and without the institution of the controversial UN regime (Paul, 1985). Last, it was revealed that nodule claims made in the 1970s by the US research ship Glomar Explorer had been inflated for the public to justify its presence in the Pacific Ocean where it was, in fact, attempt­ing to raise a sunken Soviet submarine (Broad, 1997; also personal communication, C Higginson, 21 May 1994). With diminished interest in achieving a functioning seabed mining regime or in making an anticapitalist or procapitalist statement, and with greater interest in achieving a universally accepted Law of the Sea, all parties agreed to move beyond the seabed issue. In the end, the seabed mining provisions were modified by an Implementation Agreement (United Nations General Assembly, 1994a) that essentially reduced the International Seabed Authority to a permitting organization and that introduced into the Law of the Sea "free market principles ... which are fundamentally at variance with the common heritage principle" (Robles, 1996, page 70).

Should metal prices rise, however, it remains questionable whether a license from the authority, a body lacking the sovereign territorial power of a state, would provide enough security of tenure to attract the huge quantities of high-risk capital needed before commercial mining could commence. This issue was generally avoided during the United Nations negotiations as mining interests argued in principle for a regulatory system with minimal intervention, but statements made by mining executives suggest the possibility that no license from a nonstate authority would be sufficient to mollify the concerns of financiers (Brewer, 1985; Shusterich, 1982; Takeuchi, 1979; Welling, 1985). In the case of UNCLOS Ill's seabed mining debate, the contradiction of capitalist spatiality in the ocean was temporarily resolved because the seabed lost its attraction as a site of fixed investment. But it is only a matter of time before a new ocean use requiring spatially fixed investments (or a resurgence of interest in manganese nodules) reopens this conflict (Earney, 1990).

This review of proposed solutions for reregulating ocean space reveals the severity of the contradiction when the same space is both increasingly important as a dedicated space of capital mobility and increasingly attractive as a site for intensive and spatially fixed capital investment. The first ocean space reregulation option considered—an adjustment of the industrial capitalist-era dual-zone spatial fix—would be unlikely to

416 P E Steinberg

provide long-term solutions to this crisis of regulation. The latter two options—the social fixes—would be disruptive to capitalism as we know it. As Chase-Dunn notes:

"There are two main characteristics of the interstate system which need to be sustained [if the capitalist world economy is to survive]: the division of sovereignty in the core (interimperal rivalry) and the maintenance of a network of exchange among the states" (Chase-Dunn, 1989, page 150).

One social fix—the national lakes option dividing the world ocean—would challenge the second of these two prerequisites as the elimination of an ocean commons would potentially interfere with capitalist free trade. The other social fix—the common heritage option communalizing the world ocean—would challenge Chase-Dunn's interimperial rivalry prerequisite (and possibly the free-trade requirement as well). And yet, despite its incompatibility with capitalist processes, the world's powers have seriously considered adopting the common heritage option. This suggests that when dual tendencies toward capital mobility and capital fixity bear down on an area of space traditionally reserved for mobility and rhetorically constructed as empty and 'outside' the system, the crisis of regulation is severe.

Ocean imagery reconsidered We are now in a position to revisit the three marine images with which this paper began: the ocean as a space progressively annihilated by capital in its conquest of distance, as a space of historical memory (and consumable icons) for postindustrial society, and as a space of sustainable development. Each of these images represents an attempt by capital to cope with the increasing use of the ocean as an arena for both capital mobility and capital fixity.

The ocean as annihilated space Regarding the first of these images, many scholars have noted the important role that speed and the conquest of distance play in contemporary capitalism. Even those who caution that this phenomenon masks the continued importance of place (for example, Cox, 1997) or continuity with past political-economic processes (for example, Harvey, 1989) acknowledge that the ability to transgress space with unprecedented speed and agility is a defining feature of today's capitalist political economy. Within this system of hypermobile capitalism, the ocean has taken on special importance as a seemingly friction-free surface across which capital can move without hindrance:

"Water is capital's element The bourgeois idealization of sea power and ocean-borne commerce has been central to the mythology of capital, which has struggled to free itself from the earth just as the bourgeoisie struggled to free itself from tilling the soil. Moving capital is liquid capital, and without movement, capital is a mere Oriental hoard .... [The ocean] is capital's favored myth-element" (Connery, 1995, pages 40, 56). There are several layers of irony here. If capital were truly able to transcend the

barriers to seamless mobility imposed by the distance and nature of ocean space, then, at the point at which this transcendence were achieved, the ocean could no longer have utility. Although the ocean may be "capital's favored myth-element," its utility to capital as a transportation surface lies in the ease with which it can be annihilated. As we have seen, the ocean's service in a world of capital fluidity lies in the apparent ability of corporations such as Merrill Lynch, Concert, and AT&T to wish away both its nature and the very space it occupies.

The underlying utility of the ocean as an antithetical space of movement (and the irony in capital's desire to annihilate it) is supported by Deleuze and Guatarri's iden­tification of the ocean as "a smooth space par excellence" (Deleuze and Guatarri, 1988,

I ho maritime mystique 417

page 479). As sites of alterity, 'smooth' spaces serve as necessary counterpoints to the 'striated' spaces of capital whose physical and social features and points of friction enable investment, sedentari/ation, enclosure, surveillance, and other processes asso­ciated with modern life (Deleuze and Guatarri, 1988, pages 474 500). Despite their utility, agents of capital progressively seek to absorb and 'modernize' these \smoolh' spaces because they are resistant to essential capitalist categories and institutions. Thus, the tendency to annihilate the formal independence o\^ ocean space is indicative of a more general tendency toward self-destruction, whether this annihilation is achieved through colonization by modernist institutions of navigation and militarism (as is depicted by Virilio, 1986, pages 37 49, as well as Deleuze and Guatarri) or through physical obliteration (as is idealized by Merrill Lynch and Concert).

Additionally, the intervening distance of ocean space amplifies difference, and, as poli­tical economists have long asserted, the ability to shift capital between 'different' places provides a crucial mechanism for capital accumulation (Hilferding, 1981; Lenin, 1939; Luxemburg, 1964). Capital's perverse desire to annihilate its "favored myth-element" although perhaps rational from a short-run profit-maximization standpoint runs the risk of also annihilating opportunities for the realization of value through movement, thereby reducing capital to the status of "a mere Oriental hoard."

Last, this capitalist fantasy of annihilating ocean space is ironic because, despite its representation during the industrial capitalist era as a friction-free void, the ocean may in fact be the portion of the earth's surface least amenable to time space compression. Eurodollars move from New York to Tokyo in fractions of seconds, but hydrodynamics limit the speed of the ocean freighters that carry the bulk of the world's commodities to the same speed as at the end of the First World War (Sekula, 1995, page 50). Sckula elaborates on this characteristic of the ocean in his discussion of transoceanic labor Hows:

"Acceleration is not absolute ... A society of accelerated Hows is also in certain key aspects a society of deliberately slow movement. Consider, as a revealing case, the glacial caution with which contraband human cargo moves. Chinese immigrant-smuggling ships can take longer than seventeenth-century sailing vessels to reach their destinations, spending over a year in miserable and meandering transit. At their lowest depths, capitalist labor markets exhibit a miserly patience" (Sekula, 1995, page 50).

The ocean as nostalgic space The sea is also an object of consumption: a space (and a view) that provides historical groundings for the tourist-oriented spectacles that increasingly characterize the 'post­modern' urban waterfront. As scholars such as Baudrillard (1988) and Urry (1990; 1994) discuss, three dominant aspects of 'postmodern' capitalism are incessant move­ment, the self-conscious production of places, and the perpetual consumption of images (see also Harvey, 1989; Lash and Urry, 1994; Soja, 1989; 1996). These character­istics all manifest themselves in tourism, where the tourist (by definition a moving subject) seeks out notable places and consumes their images (Britton, 1991). Indeed, the links between tourism and postmodernism are so strong that Urry (1990, page 87) claims that even during the modern era tourism was "prefiguratively postmodern." Nonetheless, for Urry, post modern tourism is distinguished by the gazed upon object's lack of claim to authenticity and by the tourist who comprehends this charade but still chooses to accept the presented object as an image to be consumed.

The image of the ocean as a space of nostalgia is particularly apparent in the harborside festival marketplace, an increasingly popular urban redevelopment strategy that both reflects the spatiality of postmodern capitalism (Kilian and Dodson, 1996) and provides an ideal backdrop for promoting consumption of commodities within the postmodern tourist economy (Goss, 1996). In the harborside festival marketplace, the

418 P E Steinberg

place's mercantile past is celebrated through the fetishization of human interactions with marine space. These marketplaces are frequently located in former customs houses or warehouses (or perhaps in a new building constructed to look like it had served a former maritime function), fishing nets and anchors abound, and there may even be a restored clipper ship parked outside. And, of course, the sea itself (or a surrogate water body) is within view, providing, as it did during the industrial era, romantic possibilities of escape, danger, and untamed nature. The difference from the industrial era is that this image of alterity, although still linked with romantic escape, is now also linked with the potential for asserting individuality through the consumption of commodities. The sea is represented as a space of consumable icons and 'memories'.

This representation of ocean space rests uneasily alongside that of the ocean as an empty space without value, an obstruction to be obliterated by the forces of hyper-mobility. On the urban waterfront, in contrast, the sea and its landward referents are fetishized as images to be consumed. Many of the goods sold at festival marketplaces are marketed as global exotica in which the ocean adds value by contributing to global differentiation. Yet the 'global village' rhetoric used in marketing these products (such as 'global village') implies the time - space compression that is idealized by the repre­sentation of the ocean as an empty space capable of being annihilated.

The uneasy balance of contradictory representations is largely achieved by portray­ing the urban waterfront as a space of historical social activity but one that is now devoid of any human interaction. Evidence of contemporary labor, production, or transportation—dockyards, fish markets, container terminals—would contradict the ocean's separateness, and so designers of festival marketplaces consciously obscure such signs of contemporary marine activity while flaunting the safely historical (Atkinson et al, 1997; Atkinson and Laurier, 1998; Goss, 1996; Sekula, 1995). The parallel with the countryside presented to tourists in England is striking:

"The countryside is thought to embody some or all of the following features: a lack of planning and regimentation, a vernacular quaint architecture, winding lanes and a generally labyrinthine road system, and the virtues of tradition and the lack of social intervention .... A particular feature of this construction of the rural land­scape has been to erase from it farm machinery, labourers, tractors, telegraph wires, concrete farm buildings, motorways, derelict land, polluted water, and more recently nuclear power stations. What people see is therefore highly selective, and it is the gaze which is central to people's appropriation" (Urry, 1990, page 97-98; see also Mitchell, 1996; Williams, 1973). Thus, the image of the sea as a space of nostalgia, like its image as annihilated

space, rests at a point of uneasy balance between the tendency to value individual places and the idealization of placelessness, inherent in the need of capital to embody fixity and mobility simultaneously. The sea is to be gazed at and even celebrated, but as an actual place of production and transportation it is largely hidden.

The ocean as resource space The image of the ocean as a resource-rich space to be rationally managed and sustainably developed is itself in contradiction with the previous two. If the ocean is a cornucopia of exploitable but fragile resources, then it could be neither a space amenable to annihila­tion nor even a space dominated by a nostalgic consumable imagery. This third representation of the ocean can also be traced to the present crisis of ocean governance resulting from the intensification of both capital fixity and mobility. Capitalism has a tendency to increasingly abstract space and time from nature (Lefebvre, 1991) and, as Altvater notes, this abstraction forms the basis for capitalism's ecological contradiction:

The maritime mystique 41M

"The heterogeneity of physical transformation in real space and time-- that is, the particularity of materials, place, and ecology—is at odds with the axiom of general comparability in the world marketplace imposed by capitalism .... The space and time of a society, and the physical time and space of nature, are in no way identical—and this is especially true for capitalism. The logics of their respective functional spaces collides [sic]. Ecological crisis can, in many regards, be under­stood in terms of this collision" (Altvatcr, 1994, pages 79-80, 82).

In other words, the ecological contradiction of capitalism is rooted in its tendency to disregard the specific material conditions of production and to abstract the temporal and spatial contexts that place limits on the potential for transforming nature. The turn to an environmentalist discourse can then be seen as a response to this contradiction.

Altvater's thesis is particularly persuasive when applied to the world ocean, for the rise of the environmentalist image (the image of the ocean as a fragile resource space to be sustainably managed) can be linked directly to the failings inherent in the spatial and temporal abstractions of the two images considered previously. In the first case, marine space and time are wished away by denying any significant materiality to the ocean. In the second, nostalgia similarly reproduces these abstractions, but the abstraction is primarily temporal; the specificity of today's maritime economy is lost on consumers gazing upon icons of the maritime past.

The language of sustainable development suggests a belated recognition of this ecological contradiction, as attempts are made to incorporate the material obstacles of space and time into the business cycle, with corporate leadership providing environ­mental stewardship (Bridge, 1998; O'Connor, 1994, pages 125- 151). This discourse of a resource-rich but fragile ocean in need of comprehensive management and planning is the result (Nichols, 1999). Thus, National Geographic asserts that individuals engaged in fishing must come to terms with "this world of inevitable limits" and give way to long-range planning and corporate management. This challenge has been taken up by the Marine Stewardship Council, a joint effort of the multinational food corporation Unilever and the World Wildlife Fund designed "to harness market forces and con­sumer power in favour of healthy, well-maintained fisheries for the future" (Marine Stewardship Council, 1997). Although National Geographic regrets the loss of the independent fishing boat owner plying the ocean's wilds, the bureaucratization of ocean management and the privatization of rights to its resources is presented as the maturation of our attitudes toward nature. The stewardship of marine resources by agents of capital is naturalized through explicit parallels to the enclosure of agricultural land in the western United States: fisheries, like post-dust-bowl agriculture, must be allowed to evolve into "big industry: highly regulated, tidy," where rational manage­ment is applied for long-term sustainability (Parfit, 1995). Likewise, The Economist declares:

"In fact, [the ocean] is a resource that must be preserved and harvested. To enhance its uses, the water must become ever more like the land, with owners, laws and limits. Fishermen must behave more like ranchers than hunters" {The Economist 1998, page 4). This managerial environmentalist perspective is supportive of general guidelines

for governing the uses of the sea without actually mandating its governance as territory. Indeed, parallels can be made with the mercantilist-era regime. Under both regimes, the ocean is recognized as a crucial space for essential social processes but care is taken to protect it from the ravages of competitive territorial states. The mercantilist designation of the sea as a special space of commerce (res extra commercium), immune to territorial appropriation but susceptible to exertions of social power, is being paralleled by a postindustrial designation of the sea as a special space of nature

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(res extra naturd). In contrast to the intervening industrial era, when the sea was denigrated as a void between the terrestrial spaces of production and consumption, the ocean is now once again configured as a significant space wherein states and intergovernmental entities are permitted to exercise nonterritorial power so as to manage the ocean's resources in a rational, efficiency-maximizing manner.

The regulatory policies consistent with this corporate environmentalism will likely prove inadequate to resolve the ongoing spatial crisis in the regulation of ocean space. Even if an ocean-management regime were to negotiate successfully the ecological contradiction of capital, it still would need to negotiate capitalism's spatial contra­diction. The account of the regulatory crisis surrounding the proposed manganese nodule regime demonstrates that this spatial contradiction is increasingly intense in ocean space, and it is questionable whether any regulatory regime that preserves the sea's nonterritorial character (whether the 'common heritage' regime proposed at UNCLOS III or a regime whereby stewardship of the ocean's resources is entrusted to a global 'ecocracy') would provide enough security for potential investors in extra-state production sites.

Conclusion: ocean space and social change In this paper I have tried to demonstrate how three popular and dominant images of ocean space actually emerge from long-standing tensions in the capitalist appropria­tion of the ocean and how these images mask underlying contradictions in the spatial and ecological organization of capital. I want to conclude by emphasizing that current struggles over the disposition of ocean space are simultaneously about the direction of social change.

There is a long history of the ocean as an arena of social transformation. It is generally acknowledged that the early seventeenth century 'Battle of the Books' gave birth to the modern structures of international law (Colombos, 1967, page 8), and ocean law remains an important arena for shaping the system of international relations that structures states as well as governing relations among them (Robles, 1996; Ruggie, 1993; Taylor, 1993; 1995). Along with contributing to some of the social categories that have prevailed in land space, including modern notions of masculinity (Creighton, 1995) and class solidarity (Rediker, 1987), struggles over ocean access have also inspired oppositional movements. They have provided an arena for challenging what Shapiro (1997) calls the "violent cartographies" of statism. Thus Foucault points to the ship at sea as the "heterotopia par excellence": "In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates" (Foucault, 1986, page 27). Historical examples of the role of the sea in forging alter­native identities and social structures range from pirate bands (Kuhn, 1997) and anarchist collectives (Sekula, 1995) to environmental movements (Brown and May, 1991) and diaspora nations (Gilroy, 1993)/4)

Building upon this history and reflecting on the recent Law of the Sea negotiations, a number of scholars have suggested that the collective governance of the sea be used as a model for radical notions of global citizenship and entitlements (Borgese, 1998; Pacem in Maribus, 1992; Van Dyke et al, 1993). Keith (1977), in a discussion that has parallels to the actual case of the proposed manganese nodule mining regime, speculates that the emergence of 'floating cities' would likely challenge the entire system of territorial states

(4) Others, however, question the liberatory potential of social reorganization at sea. In contrast to Foucault, Virilio (1986, pages 37-49) holds that the ship at sea, rather than incorporating the ocean's heterotopic (or 'smooth') properties, colonizes this once-resistant space. Likewise, there is an ongoing debate about the progressivism of seventeenth and eighteenth century pirates (Osborne, 1998).

The maritime mystique 421

that provides the foundational political divisions for capitalist competition. In literature too, the sea is increasingly depicted as a space of social liberation from the oppressions of militarism, capitalism, and patriarchy (Bcrthold, 1995), as in the novels of Oetavia Butler, Ursula LcGuin, and Joan Slonezcwskl

Whether these visions of the sea as a site of social change come to fruition is not the point. As we have seen from the recent example of manganese nodule mining, the crisis in the regulation of ocean space has intensified to the point where, for a considerable duration, the world's powers found themselves supporting a regime that seemed to challenge the principles of capitalist enterprise. The broad support that this regime received suggests the depth of the regulatory crisis, and in this context one should not underestimate the transformative potential of struggles over oceanic space, resources, and access.

This context—the structural contradiction of capitalist spatialtty—also demon­strates the superficiality (and indeed the danger) of the three images that increasingly characterize ocean space. For the images not only tell partial stories, They obscure material relations of exploitation experienced by those who derive their living from the sea—seafarers, dockworkcrs, artisanal fishing communities, and others who may be 'managed' out of existence by the regulatory strategics with which each image is aligned. Despite their erasure from the popular imagination, these individuals experience on a daily basis the fact that the ocean is a locus of intense capitalist contradiction and a potential source of social change. To interpret this contradiction and to contribute to the authoring of that social change, it is imperative that we look beyond the prevailing ocean imagery and pierce the maritime mystique.

Acknowledgements. In writing this paper I have benefited from the contributions of countless colleagues. Dick Pcct helped launch this project, Gavin Bridge aided in setting my course, Freddie Roblcs provided an intellectual compass, Carolyn Trist encouraged my journey into uncharted waters, John Grimes provided some last-minute piloting, and Karen Nichols helped me find my political anchor. Neil Smith and the anonymous reviewers were invaluable for pointing out rocks and shoals that threatened to capsize the project. I am grateful to all, and any remaining errors are my own.

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