Two weeks ago, US and British naval forces raided the Italian cargo ship,Montecristo, 600 miles off Somalia and released two dozen hostages. This week, with less fanfare, the British Navy rescued two dozen more – the Pakistani crew of a rickety dhow that had been commandeered by pirates and used as the mother ship for the Montecristo attack. The bad news is that Indian Ocean piracy is becoming an ordinary part of the shipping business; The International Maritime Bureau counts 350 attacks so far this year and ransoms now run about $4m an incident. The good news is that authorities are beginning to understand much more about piracy.
Piracy falls into a black hole between criminal law and the law of war. In Britain,wars against piracy have often been, as they were during the 1816 bombardment of Algiers, wars against slavery. The fight against piracy on the “shores of Tripoli” appears in the first line of the US marine hymn. Often it is hard to tell who is a pirate and who merely looks like one. Because most weaponry sinks in water, Somali pirates have been able to destroy evidence of their intent by the time they were boarded.
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A book recently published in France –L’Organisation Pirate by Rodolphe Durand and Jean-Philippe Vergne, both social scientists at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales – describes piracy as a recurrent feature of capitalism. While the authors understand that it can be counterproductive to get into arguments about capitalism, since no two people ever mean the same thing by it, they link piracy to capitalism’s need for a uniform legal regime across territories. When laws and technologies change, piracy – broadly understood as the rejection of authorities’ claim to control private property in any realm – tends to arise. This was true when the age of navigation led sailors into waters where no one was ruler, and it is true on the frontiers of the information age today.
Piracy, in fact, often has an economic utility. Illegal peer-to-peer file downloadshave certainly facilitated the transition to a bookless, cinema-less world. This is not to say that piracy makes the world a better place. The Economist recently described the situation in Spain – where 92 per cent of young adults admit to having downloaded peer-to-peer content – as a “1950s market”. That is, the only way to make money in movies is with a large-grossing box office smash. The result has been a crippling of Spain’s homegrown film and music culture, relative to that of other countries such as Germany or South Korea, which have stronger laws against piracy.
But many people benefit from piracy, in all its forms, not just the pirates themselves. It served the interests of 17th century Englishmen to see Jamaica turned into a pirate outpost. Online gambling in violation of local laws has something in common with piracy. Pirates are not rebels against all order, in fact, they often depend on the patronage of some powerful faction in government or business. Somali pirate raids, for example, now take place up to 1,000 miles offshore, closer to India than to Africa. Somebody has to pay for the petrol and the weeks of rations, not to mention the GPS software.
Oddly, we want to see pirates as somehow romantic or noble. The Canadian journalist and author Jay Bahadur notes in his intimate book about the world of Indian Ocean piracy, Deadly Waters, that the word for pirate in Somali isburcad badeed or ocean robber. But when the pirates themselves speak to the international press, they do so in the language of NGOs. They speak of overfishing in the waters around the Horn of Africa by Chinese trawlers, which destroyed Somali livelihoods, and present their depredations as a legitimate form of taxation – a weak case, to put it mildly.
Messrs Durand and Vergne are sceptical about the claim that offshore robbery in Somalia constitutes real piracy at all. To them, 21st century hackers resemble Blackbeard and other 17th century buccaneers more than the Somalis do. And in this, the two critics of capitalism are in accord with the Republican foreign policy thinker John Bolton, who sees robbery as the pirates’ primary goal and politics as their secondary one. Mr Bolton notes the pirates’ links to the Islamists of al-Shabaab and speaks of “piracy’s merger with terrorism”. In a similar way, Colombian rebels used to fund their guerrilla operations with the proceeds from kidnapping.
Lene Espersen, Denmark’s foreign minister, said a few weeks ago that piracy “violates the most fundamental principles of modern civilization”. It can. But what makes piracy unnerving is that it happens in places where the legitimacy of private property is no longer a foregone conclusion. It shows that the principles of modern civilization are not so much not fundamental as contingent.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
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