The difficulty in presenting the development of the Law of the Sea in a vast area is that one has to select the necessary information from a large number of sources. In almost all areas, the Law of the Sea boundaries have not been consolidated or approved by international law. This is the reason for the lack of precise maps and descriptions. Although a number of states publish documentations, these are mainly subjective interpretations of the Law of the Sea. In order to achieve a positive outcome of future talks, a few states exaggerate or falsify their claims, because their neighbours usually have a different opinion of their sea boundaries. It was therefore essential in this study to analyse the contradictions between official, scientific and economic publications of each country, the oil industry, fishing management, scientific institutes, and the press. Thus, the maps of the Law of the Sea zones, given in this book, represent the conception of the respective states only, regardless of the recognition by neighbouring states.

The regionalization of the Law of the Sea is a dynamical process nowadays, rendering it necessary to gather up-to-date information from newspapers and magazines. However, the distance between Germany and the Pacific countries hampers the flow of information considerably. In addition, slight errors and the shortcomings of topicals are inevitable in some cases. The information in this book has been gathered up to August 1985 and in some cases up to November 1986.

In spite of this unsatisfying basis, from the scientific point of view, I wrote this geographical description and documentation because it is my opinion that the new Law of the Sea will initiate long-term structural changes which are of political significance as a result of the changing national control and jurisdiction of the sea (Bohme and Kehden 1972, Johnston and Langdon 1978).

The continually widening gap between the industrialized countries and the developing countries was meant to be reduced by the Law of the Sea, but this has not been achieved. Nevertheless, jurisdictional application of the Law of the Sea brings along innovations in economic, political and military matters. Therefore, one is surprised how little this topic is known to the public and also to the politicians in many countries. It is hoped that this book will interest the reader in further scientific research (Archer and Beazley 1975; Paffen 1964; Prescott 1975) and increased political engagement on the subject.