- 1 His Chief of Staff, Admiral Christophe Prazuck, emphasized on several occasions between 2016 and 20 (...)
- 2 For example, the 42 occurrences of the terms "maritimization" and "maritimization" represent just 0 (...)
- 3 Only a hundred or so hits in English-language articles on Google Scholar, many of them written by F (...)
1The use of the notion of "maritimization" has experienced significant growth for the past twenty years. The subject of a report by the French Senate in 2012 and carried high by the French Navy for more than a decade in numerous interviews, conferences and publications1, maritimization is now prominent in French secondary school curricula since the 2016 and 2019 middle schools and high schools reforms. However, in the scientific field, it remains highly confidential, with just 673 occurrences in the sum of articles referenced in Google Scholar2. With a few notable - and recent - exceptions (Cetin, Irak and Khyaoglu, 2020), maritimization has until now been a notion used mainly in the French-speaking world, its Anglo-Saxon counterpart ("maritimization") appearing only very rarely in scientific, political, or journalistic production3.
2It is also defined in a variety of ways, and its meaning has evolved since it first appeared. It was first used in the early 1970s by French and Belgian geographers André Gamblin (1970), Roland Op de Beeck (1971), André Vigarié (1974) and Jean Pierre Chardon (1975), who, without explicitly defining the concept, used it to refer to the concentration of productive activities on coastal areas In this case, two studies on industrial activities in the Netherlands (Gamblin, 1970, Op de Beeck, 1971), the Atlantic coast of France (Vigarié, 1974), and the north coast of Puerto Rico (Chardon, 1975). Some researchers still use this definition today. In 2014, in a collective work for agrégation candidates, edited by Raymond Woessner, maritimization was defined as "the process leading the coastlines of a large number of countries to take on an increasingly important role in the economy" (Woessner (coord.), 2014, p. 443). In the scientific literature of the late twentieth century, the definition of maritimization often tangents that of "littoralization", generally understood in geography as the concentration of people and activities on coastlines (Levy and Lussault, 2013, p. 622). In this definition, the maritime space appears secondary, a mere physical support for geographic mutations visible above all on the coasts. Maritimization, in its original sense, is thus seen primarily through a local economic prism, focusing primarily on transformations in productive spaces around a port complex or coastline. In the late 1970s, however, authors such as Alain Vigarié broadened the use of this notion by speaking of the "maritimization of the contemporary economy", to designate the phases of socio-economic evolution of a society turned towards the sea (Vigarié, 1979, p.8).
- 4 International trade by sea represented around 550M tonnes in 1950, compared with over 11Bn in 2019 (...)
3In 1990, in his Géostratégie des oceans (Geostrategy of the Oceans), Vigarié introduced a new concept of maritimization, which he defined as "the increase in international exchanges by sea, multiplied by seven in some forty years" (Vigarié, 1990, p.14). He underlines the consequences of this increase on "remarkable developments in fields closely related to the transformation of the world" (Idem). Five years later, in La Mer et la Géostratégie des Nations (The Sea and the Geostrategy of Nations), he states that, "in its general sense, it means that no country can dispense without serious inconvenience with recourse to the sea, that no modern economy can be durably conceived without oceanic support" (Vigarié, 1995, p.20). This analysis is more topical than ever, as Antoine Frémont reminds us: "since 1945, international trade has been growing faster than world production, reflecting the growing interdependence of economies in relation to each other" (Frémont, 2019, p.1). As the contributors to this issue remind us, seaborne trade has increased tenfold in volume and twentyfold in value since the 1950s, according to data from the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development (Rodrigue, 2020, mobilized by Eric Foulquier, Iwan Le Berre, Colette Ranely Vergé-Depré, Lorenzo Joncheray and Clément Iphar). Today, it accounts for over 80% of world trade in goods4.
- 5 Investment, activity and the offshore drilling market, IFP Energies nouvelles, 2019, https://www.if (...)
4However, this interpretation, which is based on the growth of trade by sea, as defined in French school curricula, needs to be enriched. Thanks to the sharp rise in oil and gas prices in the 2000s, many deep offshore reserves, previously considered unprofitable, have been brought on stream. They now account for over 30% of the world's hydrocarbon production, a percentage that is constantly rising5. In addition, the rapid growth of cruise tourism and fishing activities, the new energy prospects offered by the oceans, the activities linked to the preservation of the marine environment, but also the increasing risks and threats at sea, make maritime spaces a strategic challenge for societies. This observation invites us to broaden our conception of maritimization.
- 6 " Another attempt to clear ship blocking Suez Canal fails as economic impact mounts " de CNBC, du 2 (...)
- 7 See in particular the study "Panorama actuel des canaux et détroits maritimes", n°231, May 2021. (h (...)
5In 2005, Alain Vigarié defined it as a situation of "interrelationships, even interdependencies, between national lives and oceanic spaces" (Vigarié, 2005, p.1). We propose to update and complete it as a a process of increasing dependence on the sea, due to the growing polarization of economic, social, and political activities and interests towards the sea. At a time of global production specialization and just-in-time production, this dependence exists above all in the transportation of goods. The six-day blockade of the Suez Canal following Ever Given's accident in March 2021 was an eloquent illustration of this. In the space of a few hours, speculation led to a worldwide rise in the price of a barrel of crude oil and grain, as well as a temporary disruption of the international logistics chain in many sectors6 (ISEMAR, 20217). But this dependence is also linked to the development of activities in many fields, such as the exploitation of fishing and energy resources, and tourism. This growing dependence leads to several vulnerabilities and highlights the need to protect and preserve marine areas. This concept raises many issues: economic, social, cultural, political, and geopolitical, as well as scientific. As illustrated this year by two major international symposia organized by the International Geographical Union - one on the geopolitics of islands in Osaka in April 2023, the other on seas and oceans in Milan in June 2023 - the field of research in this area is immense.
6With its resolutely trans-disciplinary identity, this issue of Etudes Caribéennes aims to continue the work of decompartmentalizing the concept of maritimization that has long been undertaken by communities of researchers in law, history, geography, political science, geopolitics and the natural sciences, by approaching it from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Consequently, this issue features six contributions, alternating between case studies in the Caribbean, West Africa and East Asia. Eric Foulquier, Iwan Le Berre, Colette Ranely Vergé-Depré, Lorenzo Joncheray and Clément Iphar analyze the geographical effects of maritimization on trade patterns and infrastructure systems in the Lesser Antilles. Using a political science perspective, Virginie Saliou highlights the strong link between the accelerating maritimization of Caribbean and South American economies, and the growth of hybrid crime, which is highly detrimental to the interests of the region's states. Sylvain Domergue takes a geopolitical approach to this issue, demonstrating that the protean challenges of maritime security in the inter-American space are prompting riparian actors to give priority to the regional scale to prevent and combat transnational maritime risks and threats. These interactions lead to a strengthening of regional integration, which nevertheless remains very incomplete. Seydou Ouattara and Norbert N'Goran Kouakou demonstrate the importance of the Ivorian agri-food maritime transport chain and its strategic importance for the national economy. Sylvain Pioch and Pierre-Yves Hardy examine, from the perspective of the fight against food insecurity, the deployment of artificial reefs in Haiti and their potential to promote the development of artisanal fishing. Finally, in an approach combining geopolitics and international maritime law, Jean Ruegg, Maurice Kwan-Chung and Fabien Brial look back at the 2016 award of the Arbitral Tribunal under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, concerning the dispute between the Philippines and the People's Republic of China in the South China Sea. They focus in particular on China's interpretation of the award, and underline the Convention's limitations in producing the expected effects in terms of maritime governance in the light of this case study. This last article, along with Sylvain Domergue's, was presented and defended at the IGU congress on island geopolitics in Osaka in April 2023.
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