ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Contentious Cartography – Drawing the UK-Norway Border in the Northern North Sea 1975-1978

• In Event: Governing the Seas: Ocean Science, International Law, and the Contested Politics of the Post-War Ocean (1 of 2)

English Abstract

The UK-Norway maritime border was defined by a Treaty (1965) which took the border north to 61° 44’ 12”. The border was a median line i.e. designed to be equidistant from the British and Norwegian coastal baselines. This talk will look at the completion of this line northwards to the UK-Norway-Faroes tripoint culminating in a Protocol (1978). This work (1975-1978) took place against the backdrop of the discovery of oil in the Central North Sea (1970), the oil price shock (1973-1974) and intense criticism within the British government that a median line had been conceded in 1965 rather using the 1958 Geneva Convention on the Continental Shelf to pin Norway back to a negligible Continental Shelf along its west coast. That notwithstanding, the British Cabinet accepted the 1965 precedent and agreed in 1975 that a median line again be used to complete the border. Relations between the hydrographers were excellent, however, internal pressures in both the UK and Norway to improve on a median line complicated and delayed this inherently straightforward cartographic project.

The only oil and gas history to examine the Anglo-Norwegian border question, Kemp’s Official History of North Sea Oil and Gas (2012), did not cover the 1978 extension. The Law of the Sea literature is weighted towards actual disputes between states. Here an in-principle agreement between states was complicated by ongoing dissent within. This paper provides a case study for the real-world internal pressures faced by cartographers in boundary setting even when implementing agreed principles.

Author

• Douglas Fleming, University of Aberdeen