全球化、海上贸易和国际法 Globalization, Maritime Trade, and International Law.docVIP

Globalization, Coastal States, and the Turkish Straits Levent Hekimoglu York Centre for International and Security Studies York University, Toronto Presented at the Conference on “The Impact of Caspian Oil and Gas Development on Turkey and Challenges Facing the Turkish Straits”, organized by The Istanbul Bilgi University Maritime Law Research Centre, 9 November 2001, Istanbul. A strong case was put forward especially from the early 1980s onwards that environmental issues are too significant for the well-being of human populations to be left out from the discussions on security. There has emerged a substantial literature since then, and nowadays that basic premise is increasingly taken for granted. While much of the environmental security literature tends to focus on global environmental degradation and regional resource scarcity issues, there is a third set of problems that pertain to what one author called “low probability high consequence hazards” (Dow 1997:61). The risks posed by maritime transportation of hazardous cargoes, especially to sensitive environmental zones and/or densely populated coastal areas, belong in this category. This particular environmental/ human security problem has been increasingly aggrevated by various aspects of the processes we, in short-hand, refer to as globalization. First of all, a tremendous growth in overall global trade has accompanied the transnationalization of production. During the past fifteen years alone global trade in goods and services has increased three-fold by value (see Chart 1). This exponential growth in international trade has been accompanied by a quiet revolution in freight transportation and a considerable growth in maritime freight traffic which after all accounts for the bulk of the international transportation of traded goods. World maritime trade of goods has doubled in volume since 1970 (see Chart 2). With an increasing volume of maritime traffic and more and more hazardous cargo being shipped around th