Hansong Li

With a global oceano-political turn amid intensifying Arctic rivalries, it is prime time to reappraise polar perspectives on international politics. Taking an intellectual-historical approach, this essay explores the thought-world of the Arctic-explorer-turned High Commissioner for Refugees, Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930). By a contextual and connective interpretation of Nansen's writings, this essay argues that the Norwegian polymath and Fram captain's Arctic oceanography informed a circumpolar worldview as an interconnected oceanic space. Moreover, Nansen mixed environmental determinism with cultural relativism into an ethical and epistemic framework, through which he defended Inuit norms against democratic domination by the forstanderskaber (local council). Finally, extending his advocacy for Greenland to other peoples and polities, especially the migrants and minorities from the Mediterranean to the Black Seas, Nansen argued against coercive state practices in favour of international movement and resettlement. In this series of argumentative moves, Nansen drew from ecology to legitimate international projects amid public humanitarian crises. Nansen's maritime international thought cautions us on the promise and peril of not only the past, but also the present rush to the unfreezing Arctic, as the once forsaken prophecy of the ‘Open Polar Sea’ gains fresh water, enabling future navigation and naval competition. Amid global displacements, by climate and by war, we have much to learn from Nansen's approach to epistemic justice and collective actions.

As the “Indo-Pacific” concept gains currency in public discourses on foreign policy, it remains poorly understood as an idea, due to inadequate surveys of its intellectual origins and international visions in global contexts. This article studies Karl Haushofer’s theory of the “Indo-Pacific” as an organic and integral space primed for political consciousness. Haushofer not only laid the oceanographic foundation of the “Indo-Pacific” with novel evidence in marine sciences, ethnography, and philology, but also legitimated it as a social and political space. Mindful of Germany’s geopolitical predicament in the interwar period and informed by sources in indology and sinology, Haushofer envisaged the political resurrection of South, East, and Southeast Asia against colonial domination, and conceived the “Indo-Pacific” vision for remaking the international order.

This paper reinterprets Rousseau’s theory of political and economic development through the lens of time. In his governmental plan for Corsica, Rousseau sees an infirm political body about to heal, grow, and prosper under changing conditions, not a static experiment of autarkic agrarianism. Therefore, Rousseau’s prescriptions of a hybrid economy, intergenerational officeholding, and future-oriented defence are themselves designed to evolve over time. Rethinking Rousseau’s concept of time clarifies long-running debates over the seemingly conflicting images of the philosopher. Neither ‘founding’ nor ‘re-founding’ Corsica, Rousseau legislates in the interim, aiming for the longevity, not the immortality, of a healthy political economy.

Whereas contemporary scholarship sees Carthage either as a Roman foil in Renaissance Humanist curricula or a symbol of commerce in Enlightenment discourses on trade, there is a significant, but so far unexplored theory of ancient Carthage as a mobile polity in early-modern political thought on the state between states. This paper argues that the reimagination of Carthage in natural jurisprudence enabled a shift in the intellectual history of empire in the era of overseas expansion, towards a political thought on the spatial fluidity of sovereignty. Furthermore, the afterlife of a mobile Carthage witnessed a transition in the language of political thinking from the martial to the economic virtue. This thread of political thinking, which ran from Bodin and Gentili to Rousseau but obtained the greatest interest and complexity in Grotius, turns to Carthage as a thought-experiment on the locality and mobility, times and spaces, continuity and expiry of states as sovereign peoples.

From the scientific and literary expression ‘flux et reflux’ to the political and juridical language of the ‘citoyens du navire,’ the ocean as a physical and social space is a salient thread over time and across genres in Montesquieu’s political thought. Amidst the high tides of maritime expansion and oceanic trade, Montesquieu’s perspective of the sea, far from static, evolved along with the thinker. This essay for the first time uses the space of the sea to navigate Montesquieu’s rhetorical choices, historical perspectives, and temporal-spatial concerns, by tracing maritime themes in Montesquieu’s oeuvres both chronologically and thematically. It points out that Montesquieu’s early-expressed interest in the sea tides, which arose in the oceanographic context in a Résomption (1720), morphed into political metaphors in the Lettres Persanes (1721), the Pensées and L’esprit des Lois (1748). And through his study of the actual seas during his journey in Italy, recorded in the Voyages, Montesquieu further advanced his thought on the sea as a significant site of social and political activity. The goal is to bring to the fore an underlying strain of thought that preoccupied Montesquieu’s intellectual development, which may in turn better contextualise his political thought in its formation.

The juridical force of time forms a critical, but hitherto unexplored part of Hugo Grotius’s discourse on the justice of war and peace. Grotius defines war as a span of time in which disputed rights and armed conflicts between states are examined in reference to temporal coordinates. This method allows him to adjust otherwise static laws to meet the demands of times and spaces in an increasingly expanded world. In doing so, Grotius is also able to reconcile multiple layers of laws in a temporal framework, which suspends one layer of law, to be revived at later times. Finally, cautious in the use of the language of time, Grotius admits both that right demands immediacy, and that justice suffers delays. By this nexus of delay (mora) and emergency (necessitas), Grotius warns against the abuse of ‘time’ as a legal concept to justify unlawful claims, which still rings with alarm today.