The edge of Europe is replete with straits, estuaries, and choke points where tidy sums could be made charging ships to pass.
And since Tehran is making a reported $2m per oil tanker allowed through the Strait of Hormuz, and Indonesian Finance Minister Purbaya Sadewa last month suggested joining Malaysia and Singapore to charge ships using the Malacca Strait, what’s to stop them?
Europe’s waterways are kept open by treaty, but events in the Gulf, as well as the return of tariffs where they were once unthinkable, suggest such agreements may not be as solid as they once were.
If the continent were to decide on tolls, Turkey would be in pole position, since it controls both sides of the Bosporus, connecting the Mediterranean and Black Seas.
The route is the lifeline for Ukraine’s grain exports — and is also critical for all the other Black Sea littoral states, including Russia — but Turkey doesn’t need to break the law to close it, just abrogate a treaty. While free passage is guaranteed by the 1936 Montreux Convention, Turkey could exit the agreement and start imposing tolls simply by giving two years’ notice.
Things are more complicated at the other end of Europe, where a treaty from 1857 obliges Denmark to let shipping transit the Skagerrak, the gateway to the Baltic. There is nothing in that agreement, the Redemption of Sound Dues, allowing Copenhagen to leave it, unless the dozen other signature states agree.
Some of those states, including Oldenburg and Mecklenburg-Schwerin, no longer exist, but others would have a problem. The treaty only happened after Britain, France, and Imperial Russia each made a hefty one-off cash payment to Denmark in return for the free passage of shipping in perpetuity. If the Danes were to renege on the treaty, those states might want their money back, at the very least.
The situation is the same at the mouths of the two great rivers that bisect the continent. At one end, Romania and Ukraine are prevented from imposing tolls on the mouth of the Danube by the 1948 Belgrade Treaty, while at the other, the Netherlands stopped charging tolls at the mouth of the Rhine after signing the Mannheim Convention in 1868. As with the Danes, neither of those treaties has an exit clause.
A further problem for the Danes, Dutch, Ukrainians, and Romanians is that they are signatories to UNCLOS, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which prohibits marine tolling.
But the convention is not universal. A third of the world’s countries have not signed it, including Iran and the US, and free navigation is a fairly modern invention.
Indeed, for most of history, tolls were the norm.
The word “tariff” originates from the medieval practice of setting tolls for ships entering the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar, when both coasts were controlled by the Moors. Ships paid their tolls at the port of Tarifa, and the name stuck.
Iran’s Hormuz tolls have certainly got regulators worried. In April, the UN’s International Maritime Organisation declared that Tehran’s action had “no legal basis.” Days earlier, the European Commission had made its own statement re-committing member states to free seas.
Until now, Europe has been governed by a free-trade mantra, and it was the centralizing of European states and the abolishing of most tolls that is credited with its boom in wealth. For example, the Zollverein, the 1834 customs union that prefigured German unification, is credited with foreshadowing the country’s enormous economic expansion.
But times are changing. The Eastern Mediterranean is already the scene of periodic naval standoffs between Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus over control of lucrative offshore gas fields. Those are inside the 200 nautical mile economic zones guaranteed by UNCLOS to Greece and Cyprus, but Turkey, a non-member, claims a big chunk of that sea for itself.
Last summer, Turkish warships physically blocked a research ship off Greece surveying the route for a power line to connect mainland Europe with Cyprus and Israel. The EU-funded sub-sea cable would allow both countries to use gas, some from the disputed fields, to generate electricity to sell to Europe. The EU protested that the action was illegal, but has since put the project on hold.
And the on-land version of tolling is making a comeback, fueled by Trump’s tariff wars. If that is taken as a sign of the crumbling of the rules-based order, European nations blessed by geography with handy choke points may be tempted to cash in.
Chris Stephen is a former war correspondent with The Guardian. He has written on war crimes justice matters for publications including The Hill, International Institute for Strategic Studies, and Counsel, the magazine of the Bar Association of England and Wales. He is the author of The Future of War Crimes Justice (Melville House, London and New York) and Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic (Atlantic Books, London and New York).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
