Singapore: ISEAS, 2014. xi, 288 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$32.90, paper. ISBN 978-981-4380-26-3.
Robert Kaplan, writing in the 28 October 2011 issue of Foreign Policy, called the South China Sea the “future of conflict.” Yet on 22 May 2014, after over 20 years of negotiations, Indonesia and the Philippines signed a maritime border agreement delineating the boundaries of their overlapping exclusive economic zones. However laboriously achieved, the spirit of compromise and cooperation in this agreement is very much needed to try to settle the plethora of conflicting territorial claims involving what the NY Times editorial board on 29 May 2014 characterized as a seemingly endless list of Asian nations, including Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam, China and Taiwan. There is also a consensus among strategic thinkers of varying schools of thought that the United States has played, and continues to play, a key role in the South China Sea, although they differ in their interpretation of the American influence. The concept of the United States as a safeguard against a rising China having a stabilizing effect by creating a feeling of security within ASEAN is one perception.
At issue in the South China Sea is which nation-state controls the large reserves of oil and gas that are thought to be available. Living marine resources are also important. According to the NY Timeseditorial board, the territorial disputes in the South China Sea have strong economic motives but they also reflect a deep-seated nationalism and as the Chinese vice foreign minister Liu Zhenmin put it, the South China Sea is central to China’s very existence as a global economic power.
The Philippines recently filed a legal case against Beijing with an international arbitration panel in the Hague, seemingly undaunted by China’s sometimes aggressive rhetoric and expansionist claims to nearly all of the South China Sea. The strategy of the Philippines clearly has implications for others in the region with similar claims against China, including Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan. Meanwhile, Vietnam and China have been sending warships into the South China Sea to confront one another.
This volume, entitled Entering Uncharted Waters?: ASEAN and the South China Sea, is in this context an exceedingly important and timely piece of scholarship based on a workshop organized by the ASEAN Studies Centre, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) at the initiative of Ambassador K. Kesavapany, who asked the question: “What does ASEAN have to do with the South China Sea?”
The answer is that all ASEAN nations, both individually and as a whole, have a deep and abiding interest in peace and stability in the South China Sea. All ASEAN nations, both individually and as a whole, also have a deep and abiding interest in the freedom of navigation and overflight above the South China Sea. Simply put, much of ASEAN members’ commerce, including traded food and energy resources, passes through or over the South China Sea.
ISEAS was very fortunate to have so many leading scholars participating in this workshop who are acknowledged experts in South China Sea issues. The list of contributors to Entering Uncharted Waters constitutes a veritable “who’s who” in South China Sea law and policy and includes Robert Beckman, director of the Centre of International Law at the National University of Singapore and head of the Programme on Ocean Law and Policy, and Ambassador Hasjim Djalal, former vice chairman of the Delegation of Indonesia to the Third United Nations Law of the Sea Conference. Even if all of these experts did not necessarily speak for their respective governments they at least well understood the positions and interests of those governments. Importantly they also offer genuine hope that increased knowledge might lead all claimants to bring their claims within the framework of the 1982 Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, to which all of the nation states of the South China Sea are party. They also point out that what continues to be regrettably conspicuous by its absence in the South China Sea is an understanding that compromise and cooperation need not threaten national sovereignty and that the quarreling nation states need to return to the spirit and intent of the 2002 ASEAN Declaration on the Conduct of the Parties in the South China Sea. The NY Times characterized the 2002 ASEAN Declaration as a lofty but non-binding agreement. However, the 2002 ASEAN Declaration included commitments to international law, a pledge to resolve disputes peacefully and a promise not to occupy uninhabited islands.
Regrettably, as noted by the NY Times editorial board on 29 May 2014, as long as the nation-states in the South China Sea continue to make maximalist sovereignty claims, there will be no agreed-upon maritime borders and only missed opportunities to manage the resources of the sea and the seabed of the South China Sea for the benefit of present and future generations.
Richard Kyle Paisley
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 350-351