Seapower in the Post-Modern World

216 pages

Andrew Livsey, PhD student, Kings College London

Too many books on sea power can be summarised as “it was important in the past so it’s important today”, making an appeal as much to emotion as logic, or are descriptive rather than analytical. This book avoids both faults, Professor Germond’s background in international relations (IR) theory enabling him to take a valuably different approach.

Indeed, it is good in a more general sense to have new work on sea power from the IR community. There was The Sea in Modern Strategy by Lawrence Martin and The Leverage of Sea Power by Colin Gray but both authors are now unfortunately dead. There are other IR thinkers who have written about sea power, of course, and other issues for IR to consider, but I still think that too many in the current international relations discipline don’t engage sufficiently with the importance of 70% of the world’s surface, and the effect action there has on the remainder.

Unfortunately, the great positive of an IR professional engaging with sea power also creates problems, for Germond’s use of specialist IR language sometimes makes it difficult for mere mortals to engage with his arguments. Use of the distinction between ‘post-modernity’ and ‘post-modernism’, let alone ‘post-modern’ and ‘neo-modern’ forced me to use a well-known search engine to understand the points being made, for the terms appear well before they are explained in the text. We also get sentences such as “the ongoing dynamics of the deterritorialisation of security are completed by a territorialisation of the sea that has initiated a movement towards a neo-modern form of sea power”. This usefully relates two things that are not always brought together, but I still had to read it twice. Elsewhere it doesn’t help that the author uses the words ‘shall’ and ‘rather’ when a native English speaker would not and changes the tense within sentences unhelpfully often.

There is, however, much of value here. Germond ably escapes the ‘it was important in the past’ tendency by examining how developing ideas about sea power – how it is formed, what it is, what it can do and what it should do – have interacted with wider developments such as the growth of international institutions and technology and continue to do so. He also engages with the major sea power thinkers besides just Mahan and Corbett and makes a genuine attempt to look beyond the dominant western viewpoint.

It is a mark of a book containing interesting ideas that one finds things to query. Germond quotes people arguing that a large merchant fleet is necessary to have a powerful navy but does not examine whether that is still true given that taking ships to sea today is easier than in the past (though still not easy in the absolute), while getting the most out of modern combat systems and integrating with land and air power, not a skill set of merchant ship personnel, has in some ways become harder as integration between environments becomes more important. I also struggled to understand why Germond argued that China’s establishment of a distant naval base in Djibouti in 2017 demonstrated that its Navy was adopting a more post-modern outlook given that others did much the same, such as the UK with Gibraltar, before becoming post-modern.

Pleasingly, there are also areas where one wants more, such as when Germond argues that the development of standing navies in the 16th to 18th centuries led to further state centralisation. This makes sense and has been touched on before, but the argument is very close to that of Charles Tilly and others from the 1970s onwards about the effect of the growth of standing armies in the same period. Reference to the arguments and the counters developed in that debate, along with an examination of the differences, could have given more depth to the discussion.

Seapower in the Post-Modern World is therefore not the easiest book to read, but the ideas at its core around the importance of difference conceptions of the creation, use and object of sea power, the uses Germond makes of the lenses available from international relations thought and the way he relates sea power to wider global developments make it a valuable one. I hope that it encourages more international relations specialists to engage with sea power, and challenges writers on sea power of all disciplines to look more widely.