Rapacious Corporate Players Are the Real Pirates of the High Seas

By Leon Fink, AlterNet. Posted April 16, 2009.

The Somali pirates literally blown away by the USS Bainbridge were unlucky thieves. In capturing a U.S.-flagged container ship, the Maersk Alabama, and its captain, Richard Phillips, they chose the wrong target.

One sequestered U.S. captain drew more attention than the hundreds of other pirate captives, either ransomed or still in Somali custody.

The difference between the Maersk Alabama and the Somalis' other targets, however, was not just that they had picked on the most powerful nation in the world, but that they were suddenly confronting a "nation" at all.

Unlike the 18th century Barbary pirates to whom they have been compared on the superficial grounds that they are both poor Muslims feeding off nearby oceanic traffic, today's pirates are stateless actors generally operating in a medium (the ocean) of weak or even fictive states. Moreover, though they may be the most violent actors at sea, the pirates' mercenary motives and ethics place them in the mainstream of today's shipping world.

In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith famously anticipated a world in which a relatively unfettered marketplace would maximize production, trade and wealth for all those who could participate in its self-governing mechanism.

Yet, even as he identified the welfare of "nations" with the expansion of "wealth" -- both of which, he believed, required restraint from governmental interference -- Smith notably allowed himself some wiggle room when it came to shipping and sea power. It was no accident, he suggested, that the "first civilized" nations were those around the coast of the tame Mediterranean that had first succeeded in "the infant navigation of the world."

Maintaining access to that navigable world and, if possible, control of the world's trade, it followed, was a crucial mark of national power. Thus it was, that in a much-debated section of his classic text, Smith provided ideological cover for the political protection of native sailors and a national merchant, as well as military fleet.

Though Smith's theoretical "exception" to the free market generally lapsed as a policy priority (particularly once Great Britain proved that free trade itself would help it rule the waves), vestiges of his logic remain in play.

The U.S., for example, long without a competitive oceangoing merchant fleet, has sought since World War I to maintain at least a minimal seagoing capacity by governmental subsidy. In the latest version of this principle, the Maritime Security Program subsidizes some 60 U.S.-flag vessels -- with U.S. officers and U.S. crew -- in foreign commerce, with the proviso that they can be summoned in event of emergency by the secretary of defense.

Thus did the Maersk Alabama, originally commissioned as the Alva Maersk by the Danish shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk Group, enter the MSP fleet in October 2004 and find itself, under contract from the U.S. government, delivering food relief off the coast of Africa in April 2009 -- with able backup from the U.S. Navy.

But the Maersk Alabama is the rare exception. For the most part, world shipping today is the prototype for "globalization," the reign of private marketplace competition over any other national or political consideration.

See more stories tagged with: somalia, shipping, pirates, maersk alabama, gloablization

Leon Fink is distinguished professor of history at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and is writing a book about the global regulation of maritime labor.

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