As I am writing this month’s blog, I am aware that I am not attending an event hosted by a leading maritime legal firm. It is about the potential impacts for shipping of the recent outbreak of tariffs and counter-tariffs sparked by the USA. At this point, it is unclear how far this will spread and what its impacts will be.
Economic impacts are inevitable. Some think there will be higher costs and lower volumes, reducing shipping’s profitability. Others, with a knowing smile, suspect that shipping will somehow pass increased costs to other parts of the supply chain and so protect its own margins. We will have to wait and see, conscious that cost pressures have a habit of impacting conditions for seafarers. For now, however, let’s think about other aspects of tit-for-tat tariffs.
The dismantling of the 19th century colonial empires and the trauma of two major wars in the early 20th century were the background against which the world has reached for a different form of international order. Bodies such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation, the World Health Organisation, the European Union, and the International Court of Justice, to name but a few, emerged.
Rather than leaving events to the two-way relationships between nations, where ultimately strength alone would prevail, such international bodies express a different approach. What if the nations of the world recognised greater shared responsibility to each other, and could work together to create a rules-based order? What if differences and disagreements could be managed by nations together and coming to a shared, or at least a majority, view rather than turning to political or military aggression? This has been our direction of travel for much of the last century.
The journey has never been complete, always in process, yet the sense that this would be the best way to go about things if it were possible has been widely shared. This sits behind such international agreements as the Kyoto Climate Accords, the Vienna Convention on Law and Treaties, and the European Convention on Human Rights.
Perhaps part of the reason why the approach of the USA is so shocking to many is that it appears to abandon the search for a rules-based international order. Instead, it pitches back toward an approach where nations should be able to do, to some extent at least, pretty much whatever they want, so long as they have the power to enforce their will.
There seems to be a withdrawal from the belief that a rules-based international order is a good thing to be sought in and of itself, and in its place, purely matters of material self-interest. International relations become a deal to be done, and those nations which want or need something must either pay for it, take it by force, or go without. Pushed even further, although I realise that this is not being explicitly said, there are no concepts of goodness, right and wrong that command our attention, simply a fight for possession.
Why does this matter for the world of global shipping? Why does it matter for seafarers? Why is it a concern for The Mission to Seafarers? Well, because the notion of a rules-based international order is the way in which global shipping has sought to manage itself. We have our own international bodies like the International Maritime Organisation, and the International Labour Organisation, treaties like the Maritime Labour Convention, and principles and declarations like the Poseidon Principles. The journey of shipping towards shared justice, welfare and sustainability is incomplete, in some areas dreadfully so, yet it is a journey engaged in with serious intent and steady, if sometimes slow, action.
There is no supranational body to simply set and enforce standards. Progress in many areas has come through developing an international order and the consensus to be bound by that. This is at least as evident in the area of seafarers’ welfare as elsewhere. Erosion of the shared international order would, in my view, be to the detriment of the industry as a whole and to the welfare of seafarers in particular.
Nevertheless, this is not the whole story. When I think about the work of the Mission in serving the seafarers of the world and their families, it seems to me that some of our best and most exciting work is done when, in direct collaboration with different bodies and business of the shipping industry, we identify an issue that needs addressing, and then in partnership with them, we address it! This is less about the application of international order and more about a profound belief in the goodness and rightness of some things. It is about finding shared values together, and through the power of partnership creating progress.
If the nations of the world do find the pull away from international rules-based order too much to resist, if values are relinquished in exchange for purely a battlefield of competing interests, then it does seem to me that organisations like The Mission to Seafarers have an interesting contribution to make. We are fully embedded within the shipping industry, yet not of the shipping industry. We know it, and know many of its participants deeply, yet we are most certainly not a “player” within its competitive weave. We bring only a passion for people and their welfare and the potential to be a catalyst, and place where those who are looking for partnership can meet and collaborate for the wellbeing of seafarers, and thereby the sustainability of the shipping industry, and thereby also the peace and stability of the world.
