Abstract
The so-called freedom of navigation through the Malacca straits and the South China Sea, some of the world’s busiest trade routes, has long been of concern to scholars and practitioners of international politics in the region. Increasing tensions around territorial disputes recently propelled the issue to the forefront of global foreign and security policy making. Yet, despite the frequent invocation of threats to the ‘freedom of navigation’ for the justification of military measures to protect the ‘liberal rules-based order’, the substance of this rule or norm remains ambiguous and the nature of the threatened order unclear. Located at the confluence of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Australian discourses represent a suitable case for clarifying both. Starting from the original provisions on navigational regimes in international law, this study analyses the meanings that officials, think tank analysts and academics have been attributing to the freedom of navigation and contextualize them in the evolving debate about order. Focusing on political rather than legal discourses, it finds that concerns with the freedom of navigation are largely unrelated to the safety of maritime transport. Instead, they serve as proxy for an increasingly static imagination of international order – written backward in time – to be secured.
Highlights
Maritime security concerns related to shipping routes through the Malacca straits ‘chokepoint’ and the South China Sea have become the major drivers of post-Cold War international politics
Medcalf’s (2016, p. 10) just as the Defence Minister’s concerns with the freedom of navigation (FoN) seemed to rest foremost with alliance politics that is a particular notion of international order, when pointing out that it was the joint AustralianUS-Japanese condemnation of Chinese actions that mattered most, noted that ‘the tensions in the South China Sea are testing American resolve, credibility and diplomatic dexterity’ and that ‘the United States is the ally on which Australian security deeply depends, and these are tests for Australia too’ (Medcalf, 2015)
The political nature of the so-called rules-based order becomes apparent in the fact that the Freedom of Navigation as one of its ostensible principal pillars, in practice, refers to the freedom of navigation for a specific country’s warships; in that the Chinese threat to the FoN mainly stands for a rather diffuse ‘Asian challenge’, and in that upholding the Freedom of Navigation essentially refers to the perpetuation by military means of the idealized prosperous and universally beneficial US-led ‘Western’ dominance that justifies specific Australian foreign and security political practices and undergirds a particular form of the state
Summary
Maritime security concerns related to shipping routes through the Malacca straits ‘chokepoint’ and the South China Sea have become the major drivers of post-Cold War international politics. 10) just as the Defence Minister’s concerns with the FoN seemed to rest foremost with alliance politics that is a particular notion of international order, when pointing out that it was the joint AustralianUS-Japanese condemnation of Chinese actions that mattered most, noted that ‘the tensions in the South China Sea are testing American resolve, credibility and diplomatic dexterity’ and that ‘the United States is the ally on which Australian security deeply depends, and these are tests for Australia too’ (Medcalf, 2015). Conform with the structural realist emphasis on military power, the US-Australia alliance gained in importance too, because it provided the stable ground from where Australian policy-makers sought to manage the shifting international order: ‘Increasingly, as we seek security in and with Asia, we will value our alliance with the United States not just for the contribution it makes to Australia’s own defence, and for its broader contribution to regional security’ The prevailing views of order, including the rules and norms that constitute it, are of a distinctly subjective nature
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