Key Points

• Through their rivalries and wars European states developed the military organization and technology to project their power on a global scale and few non-European political systems could block their expansion.

• European international law, diplomacy, and the balance of power came to be applied around the world.

• Indigenous non-Western nationalists eventually went into revolt and claimed a right of self­determination which led to decolonization and the expansion of international society.

• That was followed by a further expansion after the cold war brought about by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and several other communist states.

• Today, for the first time in history, there is one inclusive international society of global extent.

Problems of Global International Society

The core values and norms of the contemporary global society of states are international peace and security, state sovereignty, self-determination, non-intervention, non-discrimination and gener­ally the sanctity, integrity, and inviolability of all existing states regardless of their level of develop­ment, form of government, political ideology, pat­tern of culture or any other domestic characteristic or condition. We can speak of these values and norms as embodying and expressing the global covenant of contemporary international society. This social framework exists fundamentally to val­idate and underwrite the sovereignty of the mem­ber states of global international society. State sovereignty, arguably the main pillar, is universally affirmed.

But this global construct also involves problems and predicaments some of which are unprece­dented in the history of international society. Only the most important can be discussed briefly as a conclusion to this chapter.

First, there is a noteworthy absence of a common underlying culture to support global international society which cuts across all the major cultures and civilizations. There is no cultural support, compa­rable to Christianity or European civilization which helped to sustain European cum Western interna­tional society. Perhaps the norms and values of free markets, human rights, liberal democracy, and the rule of law can provide that support. They are avowed and generally observed by the vanguard developed states of the present day, such as the members of the OECD. But the fact remains that other important members of international society, such as many states of East Asia and many Islamic states, dispute some of these norms and values. Russia may yet revert to that position too.

Second, if the global covenant is going to be sup­ported in the future, that support is likely to be widely forthcoming only if its core norms and values respond to the interests and concerns of the vast majority if not all the members of contempo­rary international society. That probably requires that they be divorced or at least distanced from the norms and values of any particular culture, includ­ing that of the West. All members still clearly and publicly avow the above-noted core norms and values of international society most of which are incorporated into regional international organiza­tions, such as the Charter of the Organization for African Unity (Brownlie 1971: 2-8).

Third, the regional diversity of contemporary global international society is far more pronounced than that of European international society or any other previous society of states. That is conducive to international pluralism based on groupings of states, such as South-East Asia, Western Europe, Latin America, or Africa, which share a geographi­cal region and may also have cultural affinities and an interconnected economic life. To accommodate successfully that regional-cultural pluralism the global covenant cannot be encumbered with intru­sive norms and values of a particular culture, including those of the Western democracies.

Fourth, since 1945 there has been a definite freezing and sanctifying of international bound­aries as the globe has been enclosed by local sover­eign jurisdiction based on self-determination. That has evidently discouraged states from engaging in acts of aggression or armed intervention in other states with a view to territorial expansion which were not uncommon practices of historical European international society between the mem­bers of which recurrent wars were fought over territory and other issues. However, that has also cre­ated a barrier to the formation of new jurisdictions by effectively prohibiting a reshuffling of certain territorial jurisdictions of international society in response to changing socio-political identities and consequent demands for national self-determina­tion, such as witnessed in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Fifth, the doctrine of non-intervention has cre­ated an inversion of the traditional security dilemma in many states, particularly post-colonial and post-communist states. In those states the security threat is more likely to come from within: the prevailing pattern of warfare is internal rather than international (Holsti 1996). In more than a few sub-Saharan African countries, for example, the main security threat comes from armed rebels or from the government, or both, which often hold citizens hostage in what are referred to as failed or collapsed states (Zartman 1995). The doctrine of non-intervention makes it difficult if not impossi­ble for international society to address the problem. It is also difficult to institute some kind of interna­tional trusteeship for obviously failed states, such as Somalia, owing to the fact that the institution and law of trusteeship which currently exists is designed for colonies and not for independent countries. International society currently has no generally accepted procedures for dealing with the problem of failed states.

Sixth, the current global international society, although based on formally equal state sovereignty, in fact contains huge substantive inequalities between member states, particularly between the rich OECD states and the poorest Asian and African Third World States. That socio-economic disparity has led to an unprecedented theory and practice of international aid in which rich states are called upon to help ameliorate poverty in poor states. That has changed the ethos of international soci­ety: the traditional ethos was national self-reliance and reciprocity; the new ethos when it comes to poor states is international benevolence and non-reciprocity. International material assistance is still largely voluntary, but poor states and their advo­cates have endeavoured to make it obligatory for rich states to devote a certain share of their GNP to international aid. Global international society con­tains a normative asymmetry of non-reciprocal rights and responsibilities which previous interna­tional societies of more or less equally developed states did not contain.

Box 2.8. UN Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States

'Every State has the right to benefit from the advances and developments in science and technology . . . Every State has the duty to co-operate in promoting . . . the welfare and living standards of all peoples, in particular those of developing countries . . . International co-operation for development is the shared goal and common duty of all States ... devel­oped countries should grant generalised preferential, non-reciprocal and non-discriminatory treatment to developing countries...' (Charter of the Economic Rights and Duties of States, UN General Assembly, 1974).

Seventh, global international society is perhaps evolving into a world society, both organizationally and normatively, which differs significantly in sev­eral important respects from previous international societies. It involves cosmopolitan norms, such as human rights, which sanctify and indemnify human beings regardless of their citizenship. It involves global norms, such as environmental pro­tection, which place new responsibilities, legal as well as moral, on sovereign states, particularly those states with the greatest capacity to cause pol­lution. It involves the rebirth of minorities, the awakening of aboriginal groups, and the rise of gender in world politics. And it involves a rapidly expanding role for non-governmental organiza­tions (NGOs), such as Greenpeace or Amnesty International, which are assuming growing import­ance in world politics. NGOs have always existed, of course, but they are more prominent today than they have been since the sovereign state gained ascendancy over all other political and social groups in the seventeenth century.

Finally, this tendency for international society to evolve into a world society raises important ques­tions about the continuing primacy of state sover­eignty. Many of these issues are raised in other chapters in this book and cannot be dealt with at length here. Suffice it to say, by way of conclusion, that state sovereignty has been a defining charac­teristic of international politics for 350 years. However, state sovereignty is not a static institu­tion. On the contrary, it is a dynamic institution and it continues to evolve. For example, at one time dynastic families held state sovereignty, but today it is the collective entitlement of entire national pop­ulations. At one time sovereign states had a right to initiate aggressive war in pursuit of their self-defined interests, but that right has been denied and extinguished in the twentieth century. At one time sovereign states could control foreign popu­lated territory as colonial dependencies. That right has also been extinguished. Many other examples of state sovereignty as a dynamic, evolving institu­tion could also be given. But perhaps these exam­ples are sufficient to make us sceptical about claims that world politics is moving beyond state sover­eignty. It is far more likely that state sovereignty is evolving yet again.

However, it must be emphasized that historical change is ongoing, the dust is swirling all about, and it will be some time before anyone can get a clear view of this fundamentally important issue. But if I had to bet on the shape of world politics at the end of the twenty-first century my money would be on the prognosis that our great grand­children will be living in a world which is still defined fundamentally by state sovereignty and probably even by existing states on the map. But I would not bet that sovereign states then will be the same institutions that they are today. History will see to that.