THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES by Bobbitt Philip

Author:Bobbitt, Philip [Bobbitt, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: ePenguin
Published: 2003-03-26T15:00:00+00:00

If we take this idea—the creation of a constitution for the society of states4 from the settlement of an epochal war—in light of the relation between such wars and the constitutional order of states, then we can infer that international law arises from constitutional law. This is not merely a contemporary phenomenon; the relationship of constitutional law to international law has long been a constitutive one. It was the development of European states from the fifteenth century to the present that concomitantly brought to the world an ever-enlarging society of states formed by the perception of common ways of looking at government, and a structure of generally agreed-upon rules adopted in each century, setting out the rights of states and their duties in relation to one another and providing common international institutions.5

This society of states has a constitution; indeed, it has had at least five previous constitutions. As I have emphasized, every society has a constitution: to be a society is to be constituted in a particular way. What is distinctive about Europe is that, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, it produced a society of states. It is this society that has grown to encompass the globe. This is the society that the Americans joined in the early nineteenth century and attempted to reform in the twentieth, and to which the Yugoslav Muslims appealed for help in the early 1990s.

Each new period in the constitutional life of the State commenced with a revolution against an established domestic, constitutional order, though it is only with hindsight that one may say that a particular revolt led to the dominance of a particular constitutional form, because many such revolts have withered, or the forms to which they gave birth have contended with and been defeated by other forms that became dominant.6 Each of these periods witnessed the eruption of a grand coalitional conflict that developed into an epochal war. Most important for our present purposes, each period was punctuated by agreements that emerged from the negotiations following an epochal conflict and reflected a constitutional consensus on the part of the participating states. These negotiations established a new constitution for the society of states, defining functions for states or allotting functions differently.7 What war—and what peace—will someday be seen as having accomplished the same sort of fundamental change in the constitution of contemporary international society by legitimizing the market-state?

In the twentieth century we saw new functions allocated to the State—to enforce compliance with U.N. Security Council resolutions, for example—as well as functions allocated differently—for example, the shifting of state responsibilities to the International Monetary Fund or the International Court of Justice. Such rearrangements are not unique to the twentieth century. In Book II, we will look once again at the six periods we examined in Book I. Here, however, we will be looking at the effects of peace, rather than war, on the creation of the society of states, rather than on state formation per se.

What are the characteristics of a constitution

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