The Constitution of International Society

Abstract

It is hardly novel to speak of the constitution of international society. The League (or Sociiti) of Nations had the Covenant as its constitutive instrument. Nevertheless, the term 'international society' has a decidedly rhetorically flavour, often used interchangeably with terms like 'international community' and 'family of nations'. For some time, scholars have favoured 'order', as in 'international legal order'.1 In the field of international relations, most scholars in the United States posit a Hobbesian state of anarchy among states, while some writers in Britain have sought to redeem the idea of an international society by references to Grotius and VatteL2 Recent developments in theory present an opportunity to reconsider what might be meant by speaking of international society, and suggesting that it has a constitution. Philip Allott has recently done just this in the context of proposing 'a universal theory of human society'.3 Allott's work and the pages to follow share some of the same sources of inspiration. They differ, however, in one decisive respect Allott claimed that a society - any society, including international society 'is not a thing but a process'.4 I claim that any society, including international society, is a thing and a process. Scholarship is also a thing and a process, a series of texts and, in a familiar simile, a conversation enacted through texts. The conversation is public. Participants imagine an audience and load their texts with interlocutors formed by reference, conscious or not, to other texts. Conversations within texts spur the production of further texts, the texts themselves becoming turns in a conversation. All such