Remora

While all eyes are clapped on the Persian Gulf region right now, there are events brewing in the Caspian Region. Olivier Roy claims that the Caspian is set to become the world's second largest supplier of petroleum. I recommend Crude Maneuvers, his (pre-WCT) article detailing the strategies at play in getting the oil out of the Caspian region. There is one bit I found particularly piquant: the importance of the semantics of the term, Sea.

"Russia and Iran have some interests in common. The first concerns the legal status of the Caspian. For Moscow and Tehran, it is a lake while Azerbaijan, strongly supported by the USA and more discreetly by Turkmenistan, regards it is an inland sea. The stakes are clear: if the Caspian is a lake, then its resources would have to be divided equally among the surrounding states, whatever the extent of their territorial waters. If it is a sea, its resources would be divided according to a state's territorial waters, which are determined by projecting the length of a nation's littoral out into the Caspian.

For obvious reasons Russia and Iran, which occupy the two narrow ends of the great rectangle which is the Caspian, argue in favour of a lake; Azerbaijan is for marine status, which would give it the bulk of the offshore reserves. Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are instinctively pro-sea but, for political reasons, have been forced into the pro-lake camp. On 12 November 1996 Russia, Iran, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan signed a protocol in Ashgabat affirming that the territorial waters of the Caspian states extended only 45 miles into the Caspian waters, the remainder of which would be exploited in a consortium. Azerbaijan has refused to sign. "

Ah, regional ontology meets geography in a Smackdown of epic proportions! Here's a game for you analytic philosophers out there -- analyze 'sea' as an intensional object. The winner gets a couple trillion dollars.

The objection to relativism, and its near cousin, nominalism, is that there are facts beyond our conventions upon which those conventions are ultimately based. I think that must be true in one sense; but in another sense, the "beyond" in which the facts are located is obscure, and spelling it out has always deepened, rather than clarified, that obscurity. To paraphrase Hegel, it has painted gray in black. Perhaps a better way of looking at the duality between 'fact/event' and description is to acknowledge that facts are weak things. They don't impinge on us so clearly as to exclude the possibility of dispute about any single fact. At the same time, disputes can't do without a lot of facts -- a whole pattern of them. Which implies, does it not, that there might not be any single fact, but that facts come in patterns.

I wonder if this is ever going to come before some International Court. And I wonder how I can volunteer to be an expert witness.