A legal revolution
The ‘natural’ conception of complete freedom of action at sea (Grotius, Mare Liberum, 1609), in which the world’s oceans are open to all the world’s navigators, was called into question by the more restrictive view of maritime law espoused by the Englishman John Selden (Mare Clausum, 1635). The first doctrine crushed the second for three centuries, and the path that leads from one to the other is marked by a number of important milestones.
Until 1958, the sea was only thought of as a horizontal plane, entailing an absolute freedom of communication that was vital to the world’s numerous thalassocracies. The ‘customary law of the sea’ thus remained unchanged from 1625 to 1958. After 1958-1960, the sea acquired a vertical dimension and thereby a volume in which food, energy and mineral resources are the essential elements. This seriously dented the freedom of all to harvest the sea’s natural resources, and these changes accelerated between 1965 and 1974 with the growth in size of territorial waters. The world’s oceans lost a significant part of their surface area, strategic straits became controlled by neighbouring states, and some countries became incapable of controlling their immense maritime domain.
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