"Legal Shields Against Leviathans: The Philippines’ Bid to Anchor the South China Sea in Law"
![empty formal interior, natural lighting through tall windows, wood paneling, institutional architecture, sense of history and permanence, marble columns, high ceilings, formal furniture, muted palette, an empty treaty negotiation chamber, polished teak table covered in rolled parchment and a large yellowed map of the South China Sea with faded ink borders, morning light streaming through floor-to-ceiling colonial windows, dust motes floating in silence, atmosphere of suspended judgment and quiet defiance [Bria Fibo]](https://081x4rbriqin1aej.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/viral-images/a647bd34-4802-453d-87c6-10068b1fcfc7_viral_2_square.png "empty formal interior, natural lighting through tall windows, wood paneling, institutional architecture, sense of history and permanence, marble columns, high ceilings, formal furniture, muted palette, an empty treaty negotiation chamber, polished teak table covered in rolled parchment and a large yellowed map of the South China Sea with faded ink borders, morning light streaming through floor-to-ceiling colonial windows, dust motes floating in silence, atmosphere of suspended judgment and quiet defiance [Bria Fibo]")
When a rising power resists multilateral legal frameworks, smaller states often turn to existing institutions to anchor their position—in this case, ASEAN-led negotiations and UNCLOS as counterweights to unilateral claims. The pattern is not new; the instruments are.
It has happened before—not in the South China Sea, but in the North Sea, three centuries ago—when a young Dutch jurist named Hugo Grotius penned *Mare Liberum* ("The Free Seas") to challenge Portugal’s monopoly over global trade routes, declaring that the sea belonged to all. Then, as now, a smaller power faced a dominant claimant controlling vast maritime domains by force, not law. Grotius’ treatise didn’t end the conflict, but it planted a seed: the idea that oceans could be governed not by conquest, but by consensus.
Today, the Philippines is writing the 21st-century version of that argument—not with quill and parchment, but through ASEAN negotiating tables and references to UNCLOS. The irony is that China, once a victim of “unequal treaties” imposed by imperial powers, now stands where Britain or Japan once did—resisting external legal constraints on its sovereignty. The deeper pattern is this: **every empire, in its rise, rejects the rules that once constrained its predecessors**—until it becomes the guardian of those same rules in its decline.
The 2016 PCA ruling was the modern *Mare Liberum*—a legal declaration that no nation, however powerful, can claim the sea as its own. The battle now is not just over reefs or fishing rights, but over whether that ruling becomes a precedent or a footnote. And history shows that such moments—when law confronts power—often define the character of the era that follows.
—Marcus Ashworth
Published January 22, 2026