It began as a very small dispute. Pan American World Airways planned to introduce a service from San Francisco to Paris with a stop in London, using a Boeing 747 aircraft from San Francisco to London and a smaller Boeing 727 aircraft from London to Paris. The change to a smaller plane would have enabled the most efficient and economic use of Pan Am’s fleet. In aviation as in railroad terminology, a change along a route to equipment of a different size is called a “change of gauge.”

The legal regulation of military objects on the seabed and in general of military uses of the seabed seems to have ceased to attract the attention of the international community since the conclusion in 1971 of the Treaty on the Prohibition of the Emplacement of Nuclear Weapons and Other Weapons of Mass Destruction on the Seabed and Ocean Floor (the Seabed Treaty). Attention now seems to be concentrated on other military uses of the sea, especially those concerning the mobility of naval fleets. This shift in focus is particularly noticeable if one considers the work of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea.

“Autonomy” is not a term of art or a concept that has a generally accepted definition in international law. Indeed, one surveying either the literature on the subject or the examples brought forth to demonstrate the existence of the concept is apt to conclude, to paraphrase the late jurist John Chipman Gray, that “on no subject of international law has there been so much loose writing and nebulous speculation as on autonomy.” Yet the term is very much in vogue today. The Camp David framework, for instance, establishing the context for negotiating peace in the Middle East, seeks to provide “full autonomy to the inhabitants” of the West Bank and Gaza. Regional autonomy has been extended recently to the Basque country and Catalonia by Spain, and to the 34 atolls composing the Marshall Islands by the United States. Currently, demands for greater autonomy have been made by the Shetland Islands against Great Britain, as well as by Quebec against Canada. Greek officials have offered to create “a self-administered and inviolable” area within Greece as a permanent site for the Olympic Games. While conventional wisdom accords regional autonomous entities only limited status under international law, the increasing frequency of claims to autonomy and the incremental effect such claims will have upon the international legal order make the concept of autonomy ripe for review.