Environmental Regimes

As scientists have become increasingly aware of the damage being done to the global environment, so the importance attached to the need to establish environmental regimes has steadily risen. Oil pol­lution, global warming, and damage to the ozone layer are the issues which have attracted most pub­lic attention, but regimes have been established in a wide range of areas in the attempt to protect the global environment. For example, international conventions to save endangered plant and animal species can be traced back to the 1970s, and a comprehensive Convention on Biological Diversity came into force in December 1993. There have also been attempts since the mid-1980s to regulate the international movement of hazardous waste mater­ial, with the Basle Covention establishing a com­plete ban in March 1993 on the shipping of hazardous waste from countries in the developed world to countries in the underdeveloped world.

Despite the wide range of agreements intended to protect the global environment, it is unlikely that many will consolidate into full-blown regimes. Instead, there is a perennial danger that they will degenerate into dead-letter regimes. Even agreements which do prove to be effective may not turn out to have solved the original problem. For exam­ple, attempts to deal with the ozone layer can be traced back to 1977 when the United Nations Environment Programme established a Co-ordinat­ing Committee to deal with the ozone layer. With the accumulating evidence about the damage being caused by pollution, concerned states eventually agreed to implement the Montreal Protocol in 1989 which put forward a raft of measures to protect the ozone layer. Despite the rapid implementation of these measures, scientific evidence in 1996 indi­cated that the situation was continuing to deterio­rate. The initial measures were proving to be inadequate and it was clear that the rules estab­lished in the original regime would need to be extended. Even more depressing for environmen­talists was the 1995 conference on climate change which met in Berlin. Although the problem of global warming was addressed, it proved impossible to agree on measures which might deal with the issue.

Communication Regimes

Prior to the nineteenth century, the most signifi­cant areas of international communication regu­lated by regimes were concerned with shipping and postal services. With further developments in tech­nology however, the need for regimes extended to the international regulation of aircraft and telecommunications. Collectively, the resulting network of regimes can be seen to provide an essen­tial part of the infrastructure underpinning the modern international economy. Without this infrastructure, international trade, foreign invest­ment, and the worldwide monetary system could not be sustained.

The need for a regime governing shipping can be traced back to the technological developments in ship-building in the sixteenth century that permit­ted in subsequent centuries an extraordinary expansion of international trade. This expansion could not have gone on, however, without the con­solidation of a tacit regime ensuring, among other things, the freedom of movement for shipping on the high seas and the right of innocent passage through territorial waters under the sovereign juris­diction of maritime states. The bulk of interna­tional trade continues to be transported by sea and these central norms remain in place. However, key rules operating under these norms have undergone change. In the third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) which went on from 1973 to 1982, for example, territorial waters were extended from three to twelve miles, but this new rule left the underlying norm about innocent pas­sage undisturbed.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a range of organizations have emerged to manage and strengthen the regimes which secure interna­tional communications. In 1863 the major indus­trial states came together to establish a standardized system for postal communication and this was formalized with the establishment of the Universal Postal Union in 1874. In 1865, the International Telegraph Union Tame into existence to regulate telegraphic communication and this evolved into the International Telecommunications Union in 1932 to cope with the increasingly complex technological developments in communications. Finally it is worth making reference to a range of organizations which have helped to maintain the regimes which operate in the areas of shipping and aircraft. The International Maritime Organization and the International Civil Aviation Organization, for example, are both specialized agencies of the United Nations and are responsible for the emer­gence of a large number of conventions which rein­force the regimes which can be observed in these crucial areas of international transport.