Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations
Author(s): John Gerard Ruggie
Source: International Organization , Winter, 1993, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Winter, 1993), pp. 139-
174
Published by: The MIT Press
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Territoriality and beyond:
problematizing modernity in
international relations
John Gerard Ruggie
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
-T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding
The year 1989 has already become a convenient historical marker: it has been
invoked by commentators to indicate the end of the postwar era. An era is
characterized by the passage not merely of time but also of the distinguishing
attributes of a time, attributes that structure expectations and imbue daily
events with meaning for the members of any given social collectivity. In that
sense, what the journalist Theordore H. White observed in 1945 is true once
again: the world, he wrote, is "fluid and about to be remade."1 Arguments will
continue for many years to come about the determinants of the collapse of the
old postwar order and the contours of the new post-postwar order. But even
among diverse theoretical traditions there exists a shared vocabulary describing
"the world" that has become fluid and is being remade: in its simplest,
irreducible terms, it is the world of strategic bipolarity.
The same cannot be said of another "world" that also may be fluid and in the
process of being remade: the modern system of states. This world exists on a
deeper and more extended temporal plane, and its remaking involves a shift
not in the play of power politics but of the stage on which that play is
An earlier draft of this article was presented at the British Social Science Research Council
Conference on Nation-States and the International Order, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 4-6
September 1991. I am grateful to Barry Buzan, Caroline Bynum, Ernst Haas, Andreas Huyssen,
Stephen Krasner, Hendrik Spruyt, Tracy Strong, and Alexander Wendt for their comments and to
David Auerswald for research assistance.
1. Theodore H. White, In Seach of History: A Personal Adventure (New York: Harper & Row,
1978), p. 224.
International Organization 47, 1, Winter 1993
? 1993 by the World Peace Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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140 International Organization
performed.2 Here, no shared vocabulary exists in the literature to depict
change and continuity. Indeed, little vocabulary for it exists at all.
Take efforts to express the emerging architecture of the European Community
(EC) as a case in point. "It is a negative characteristic which first imposes
itself," the Marxist theorist Etienne Balibar concedes. "The state today in
Europe is neither national nor supranational, and this ambiguity does not
slacken but only grows deeper over time."3 From the other side of the political
spectrum, The Economist agrees and gropes for metaphor: in place of older
federative visions, it sees "a Europe of many spires," a European "Mont Saint
Michel."4 For their part, Eurocrats speak of overlapping layers of European
economic and political "spaces," tied together, in the words of EC Commission
President Jacques Delors, by the community's "spiderlike strategy to organize
the architecture of a Greater Europe."5
These formulations are not terribly precise or definitive. Still, they are
improvements over the treatment Europe typically receives in the standard
academic literatures. In Kenneth Waltz's classic neorealist treatise, the EC
earned only a few fleeting references, and then only to argue that it would
never amount to much in the "international structure" unless it took on the
form of a unified state.6 In the instrumental rationality of game theory and
transactions cost analysis, macrostructures are either taken for granted or
treated as relatively unproblematic consequences of the interplay of micromotives,
and hence generate little interest as independent social facts.7 And,
regional integration theory long ago acknowledged its own obsolescence in the
face of the new European reality.8 In none of these theoretical perspectives is
there so much as a hint that the institutional, juridical, and spatial complexes
associated with the community may constitute nothing less than the emergence
of the first truly postmodern international political form.
2. For a specification of the ontological and epistemological differences among incremental,
conjunctural, and secular or epochal time frames, see John Gerard Ruggie, "Social Time and
International Policy," in Margaret P. Karns, ed., Persistent Patterns and Emergent Structures in a
Waning Century (New York: Praeger, 1986), pp. 211-36. Within that typology, the "normal politics"
studied by much of the international relations field falls into the incremental category, the cold war
exemplifies the conjunctural, and the modern system of states the epochal time frames.
3. Etienne Balibar, "Es Gibt Keinen Staat in Europa: Racism and Politics in Europe Today," New
Left Review 186 (March/April 1991), p. 16, emphasis original.
4. "Many-spired Europe," The Economist, 18 May 1991, p. 16. Some twenty years ago, I
suggested that integration theory move from the model of a "tree" (in graph-theoretic terms) to
depict the institutional end-point of the integration process to one of a semi-lattice-the definition
of which sounds very much like a formal representation of The Economist's European Mont Saint
Michel. See John Gerard Ruggie, "The Structure of International Organization: Contingency,
Complexity, and Postmodern Form," Peace Research Society (International) Papers, no. 18, 1972.
5. "Inner Space," The Economist, 18 May 1991. Delors is cited in Alan Riding, "Europeans in
Accord to Create Vastly Extended Trading Bloc," New York Times, 23 October 1991, p. Al.
6. See Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
7. See, for example, Geoffrey Garrett, "International Cooperation and Institutional Choice:
The European Community's Internal Market," International Organization 46 (Spring 1992),
pp. 531-60.
8. See Ernst B. Haas, The Obsolescence of Regional Integration Theory, Research Mongraph no.
25 (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1976).
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Territoriality 141
Prevailing perspectives may have difficulty describing and explaining the
process of European transformation, but none suggests that it is not occurring.
At the level of the global economy, in contrast, the phenomenon of transformation
not only strains the available vocabulary but on some accounts, its very
occurrence remains in doubt.
There has been a remarkable growth in transnational microeconomic links
over the past thirty years or so, comprising markets and production facilities
that are designated by the awkward term "offshore"-as though they existed in
some ethereal space waiting to be reconceived by an economic equivalent of
relativity theory. In this offshore area, sourcing, production, and marketing are
organized within "global factories,"9 in some instances "global offices,"10 and
most recently the "global lab""1-real-time transnational information flows
being the raw material of all three. Financial transactions take place in various
"Euro" facilities, which may be housed in Tokyo, New York, and European
financial centers but which are considered to exist in an extranational realm.1
Cross-investment among the leading firms or other means of forging transnationalized
intercorporate alliances increasingly are the norm.13 Trade is made
up disproportionately of intrafirm transactions as opposed to the conventional
arms-length exchange that is the staple of economic models and policy.14 And,
the financial sector, which historically (and in theory) is assumed to follow and
service the "real" sector, now dwarfs it completely.15
Furthermore, the largest share of the "goods" that are "traded" in this
offshore world actually are "services."16 The Economist magazine, with tonigue
9. For a description of global factories, see Joseph Grunwald and Kenneth Flamm, The Global
Factory: Foreign Assembly in International Trade (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution,
1985).
10. Steve Lohr, "The Growth of the 'Global Office'," New York Times, 18 October 1988. For
example, Citibank does some of its financial data processing in Jamaica; American Airlines
processes ticket stubs in Barbados and the Dominican Republic; and New York Life processes
claims and McGraw-Hill, magazine subscription renewals, in Ireland.
11. The term is drawn from Pollack: "Just as they once moved manufacturing plants overseas,
American companies are now spreading their research and product development around the
world, helping to turn the creation of technology into an activity that transcends national borders."
See Andrew Pollack, "Technology Without Borders Raises Big Questions for U.S.," New York
Times, 1 January 1992, p. Al.
12. Joan E. Spero, "Guiding Global Finance," Foreign Policy 73 (Winter 1988-89), pp. 114-34.
13. See Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations (New York: Knopf, 1991).
14. Some 40 percent of U.S. trade is of the intrafirm variety, a ratio that increases to close to
two-thirds if more relaxed definitions of "related party" are used. Moreover, intrafirm trade has
been growing more rapidly than the standard stuff, and it is less sensitive to such macroeconomic
factors as exchange rates. For evidence, see Jane Sneddon Little, "Intra-firm Trade: An Update,"
New England Economic Review (May/June 1987), pp. 46-51; and the earlier but still useful study by
Gerald C. Helleiner, Intra-firm Trade and the Developing Countries (London: Macmillan, 1981).
15. International trade amounts to some $2.5 to $3 trillion per year; international capital
markets turn over at least $75 trillion, and foreign exchange transactions now amount to
approximately $1 trillion per day.
16. Definitions are so bad that the balance of world services imports and exports routinely is off
by as much as $100 billion per annum-a margin of error equivalent to fully one-fifth of all traded
services; see Ronald K. Shelp, "Trade in Services," Foreign Policy 65 (Winter 1986-87). Bhagwati
suggests several creative definitional distinctions but ends up recommending that the term "trade
in services" be abandoned in favor of "international service transactions"; see Jagdish Bhagwati,
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142 International Organization
only half-in-cheek, has proposed defining services as "things which can be
bought and sold but which you cannot drop on your foot,"-acknowledging the
difficulty of devising a more rigorous definition.17 Nor is it entirely clear what it
means to say that services are traded. In merchandise trade, factors of
production stand still and goods move across borders; in traded services,
typically the factors of production do the moving while the good (service)
stands still: it is produced for the consumer on the spot. What is called trade,
therefore, is really "investment," or at the least "right of establishment,"
baffling trade theorists and negotiators alike.18
The orthodox liberal position that these developments somehow imply the
growing irrelevance of states is, as Janice Thomson and Stephen Krasner
suggest, "fundamentally misplaced."19 Indeed, states are anything but irrelevant
even in the ever more integrated EC. Nevertheless, the standard realist
ground for rejecting the transformational potential of these developments is
equally misplaced. A leading realist journal of opinion recently offered a
particularly egregious illustration in response to Robert Reich's probing
question about the new world of transnationalized production networks, "Who
is 'Us'?"20 Reich sought to voice the conceptual complexities entailed in
determining whether something is an American product any longer and
whether the legal designation, "an American corporation," still describes the
same economic entity, with the same consequences for domestic employment
and economic growth, that it did in the 1950s and 1960s. The response to Reich
was a baffling and bizarre-but not atypical-string of non sequiturs, for
example: "Only the state can defend corporate interests in international
negotiations over trade, investment, and market access.... If the existence of
the state is in doubt, just ask the depositors of BCCI in some fifty countries who
"Trade in Services and the Multilateral Trade Negotiations," The World Bank Economic Review,
vol. 1, no. 1, 1987. See also Dorothy I. Riddle, Service-Led Growth (New York: Praeger, 1986); Orio
Giarini, ed., The Emerging Service Economy (London: Pergamon Press, 1987); Terrence G. Berg,
"Trade in Services," Harvard International Law Journal 28 (Winter 1987); and Mario A. Kakabadse,
International Trade in Services (London: Croom Helm for the Atlantic Institute for International
Affairs, 1987).
17. "A Gatt for Services," The Economist, 12 October 1985, p. 20. See also "Netting the Future:
A Survey of Telecommunications," The Economist, 19 March 1990; and "A Question of Definition:
A Survey of International Banking," The Economist, 7 April 1990.
18. At the time of this writing, indications are that the Uruguay Round will bring into the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) framework that portion of international services
which fits the conventional understanding of international trade. However, that portion is relatively
small compared with the whole, and numerous highly disputatious issues lurk beyond the
conventional framework. See "GATT Brief: Centre Stage for Services?" The Economist, 5 May
1990, pp. 88-89; and "GATT and Services: Second Best," The Economist, 3 August 1991.
19. Janice E. Thomson and Stephen D. Krasner, "Global Transactions and the Consolidation of
Sovereignty," in Ernst-Otto Czempiel and James N. Rosenau, eds., Global Changes and Theoretical
Challenges (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989), p. 198. See also Stephen D. Krasner,
"Global Communications and National Power: Life on the Pareto Frontier," World Politics 43
(April 1991), pp. 336-66.
20. See Ethan B. Kapstein, "We are US: The Myth of the Multinational," The National Interest
26 (Winter 1991/92), pp. 55-62. The full exposition of Reich's argument is in The Work of Nations,
the final chapter of which is entitled "Who is 'US'?"
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Territoriality 143
woke up one morning in July to find their accounts frozen.... If the United
States wanted to prevent the gathering or transmission of information by
satellite, it could easily do so by shooting the satellite down."21 And thus the
conclusion, in the title of the essay, that "We are US."
There is an extraordinarily impoverished mind-set at work here, one that is
able to visualize long-term challenges to the system of states only in terms of
entities that are institutionally substitutable for the state. Since global markets
and transnationalized corporate structures (not to mention communications
satellites) are not in the business of replacing states, they are assumed to entail
no potential for fundamental international change, Q.E.D. The theoretical or
historical warrant for that premise has never been mooted, let alone defended.
Illustrations of analytical problems of this sort can be multiplied many times
over in other issue-areas. The global ecological implosion inherently invites
epochal thinking, yet analytically informed empirical studies of "ozone
diplomacy" or of attempts to save the Mediterranean invariably focus on
negotiation processes and the dynamics of regime construction, as opposed to
exploring the possibility of fundamental institutional discontinuity in the
system of states.22 They do so because, among other reasons, prevailing modes
of analytical discourse simply lack the requisite vocabulary.
The worst offender by far is the American field of security studies.
Notwithstanding its alleged renaissance, no epochal thought has been expressed
by any serious specialist in that field since 1957, when John Herz
published his essay, "Rise and Demise of the Territorial State"-and this
despite the fact that changes in military technology and in the relations of force
are widely acknowledged to have been driving factors of political transformation
throughout human history.23
The long and the short of it is, then, that we are not very good as a discipline
at studying the possibility of fundamental discontinuity in the international
21. Kapstein, "We are US," pp. 56 and 61.
22. See Richard Elliot Benedick, Ozone Diplomacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1991); Lynton Keith Caldwell, International Environmental Policy (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1984); Oran R. Young, International Cooperation: Building Regimes for Natural
Resources and the Environment (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); and Peter Haas,
Saving the Mediterranean (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
23. On the field's alleged "renaissance," see Stephen M. Walt, "The Renaissance of Security
Studies," International Studies Quarterly 35 (June 1991), pp. 211-39. For John Herz's view, see his
articles "Rise and Demise of the Territorial States," World Politics 9 (July 1957), pp. 473-93, and
"The Territorial State Revisited-Reflections on the Future of the Nation-State," Polity 1 (Fall
1968), pp. 11-34, in which he elaborated and modified some of his earlier ideas. The recent interest
in the "obsolescence" of war among democracies was not initiated by international security
specialists-see, for example, John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major
War (New York: Basic Books, 1989)-though it has now attracted serious attention from some. For
examples see Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Robert W. Jackman, and Randolph M. Siverson, eds.,
Democracy and Foreign Policy: Community and Constraint, special issue, Journal of Conflict
Resolution 35 (June 1991). A partial exception to my characterization of the security studies
literature is Robert Jarvis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1989). On the historical relation between military changes and political transformation, see
William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and Charles Tilly,
Coercion, Capital, and European StatesAD 990-1990 (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
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144 International Organization
system; that is, at addressing the question of whether the modern system of
states may be yielding in some instances to postmodern forms of configuring
political space.24 We lack even an adequate vocabulary; and what we cannot
describe, we cannot explain. It is the purpose of this article, in Clifford Geertz's
apt phrase, to help us "find our feet" in this terrain, which is the necessary first
step of any scientific endeavor, no matter how hard or soft the science.25
In the next section, I summarize briefly the major features of the lively
debate about postmodernism that has been taking place in the humanities. It is
suggestive in many respects, but it does not solve our problem entirely because
the modern state and system of states barely figure in it. The bulk of this article
therefore is devoted to a relatively modest and pretheoretical task: to search for
a vocabulary and for the dimensions of a research agenda by means of which we
can start to ask systematic questions about the possibility of fundamental
international transformation today. The central attribute of modernity in
international politics has been a peculiar and historically unique configuration
of territorial space. Hence, I shall proceed by re-examining the transformation
whereby this configuration of territorial space first came to be.
The ends of modernity
The concept of postmodernity suggests a periodizing hypothesis, an epochal
threshold, the end of "an historical project."26 That much is clear. But, what is
the universe of discourse and practices to which it pertains? To that question
numerous possible answers exist, not all of which are of equal interest for
present purposes.
When the term "postmodernity" first gained currency in the 1970s and 1980s,
it referred largely to recent developments in the realm of aesthetics or style: th
nostalgic eclecticism in architectural forms, the prevalence of pastiche and
abrupt juxtapositions of imagery in art, the deconstructivist impulse in
literature. Simultaneity and superimposition replaced sequence; the subject
was decentered, dismembered, and dispersed; and language was made to turn
in on itself to create a void of infinite signification where the quest for meaning
had previously unfolded.27 In the field of international relations, these
expressions of postmodernity have been symptomatic at best; as Pauline
Rosenau has shown, they are preoccupied with style and method and offer only
limited substantive insight.28
24. One recent attempt to correct this shortcoming, to which I return below, is James N.
Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).
25. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 13.
26. The term is due to Albrecht Wellmer, "On the Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism,"
Praxis International 4 (January 1985), p. 337.
27. Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987),
especially chap. 4, which presents a widely used schema differentiating modern from postmodern
aesthetic practices.
28. Attempts to relate the postmodern reading of texts to issues in international relations may be
found in James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro, eds., International/Intertextual Relations
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Territoriality 145
It was not long, however, before postmodernity came to be associated not
merely with matters of style but with a historical condition, indicating,
according to Andreas Huyssen, a "slowly emerging cultural transformation in
Western societies."29 This transformation concerns the fate of what Jurgen
Habermas calls the "project" of modernity, first formulated by the eighteenthcentury
philosophers of the European Enlightenment; i.e., systematic efforts
"to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art,
according to their inner logic."30 The Enlightenment was animated by the
desire to demystify and secularize, to subject natural forces to rational
explanation and control, as well as by the expectation that doing so would
promote social welfare, moral progress, and human happiness. The optimism,
certitude, and categorical fixity of this project were shattered-by Nietzsche,
Freud, Wittgenstein; Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg; Braque, Picasso, Duchamp;
Joyce, Proust, Becket; Schoenberg, Berg, Bartok; two world wars, a Great
Depression, Nazi death camps, Stalin's Gulags, Hiroshima, and Nagasakilong
before Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida pronounced and celebrated its
demise.
Although the terrain is high culture, the subsequent battle between "Frankfurters
and French fries," as Rainer Nagele has described it irreverently, has
been fought largely on political grounds. Habermas has endeavored to hold on
to the intentions of the Enlightenment in order to complete its project.31
According to Huyssen, Habermas "tries to salvage the emancipatory potential
of enlightened reason which to him is the sine qua non of political democracy.
Habermas defends a substantive notion of communicative rationality, especially
against those who will collapse reason with domination, believing that by
abandoning reason they free themselves from domination."32 Lyotard is hostile
to the very thought: "We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the
whole and the one," he shouts. "Let us wage a war on totality; let us be
witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences."33 Even
Habermas's admirers express doubts about the viability of his quest.34 Nevertheless,
the Paul de Man saga, especially the shameful defense of de Man by
several leading deconstructivists, shows poignantly how deleterious the politi(Lexington,
Mass.: Lexington/Heath, 1989). For a sympathetic yet critical review of this literature,
see Pauline Rosenau, "Once Again into the Fray: International Relations Confronts the
Humanities," Millenium 19 (Spring 1990), pp. 83-110.
29. Andreas Huyssen, "Mapping the Postmodern," New German Critique 33 (Fall 1984), p. 8.
30. Jurgen Habermas, "Modernity and Postmodernity," New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981),
p.9.
31. These are Habermas's terms; see ibid.
32. Huyssen, "Mapping the Postmodern," p. 31.
33. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodem Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984), pp. 81-82.
34. See Huyssen, "Mapping the Postmodern"; and Martin Jay, "Habermas and Modernism," in
Richard J. Berstein, ed., Habermas and Modemity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), pp.
125-39.
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146 International Organization
cal consequences can be that follow from the moral vacuum-if not moral
vacuity-the French fries would have us inhabit.35
The two distinctively modern programs for mastering international relations
are deeply implicated in this project of modernity: realist balance-of-power
thinking and idealist institutionalism, both of which have their origins in the
eighteenth century. On the realist side, the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) enshrined
the notion of a self-regulating equilibrium as a core feature of European society
together with the idea that the defense of that equilibrium should be of concern
to one and all.36 For realist theorists of the day, "the sovereign states followed
their ordered paths in a harmony of mutual attraction and repulsion like the
gravitational law that swings planets in their orbits."37 On the idealist side, the
eighteenth century opened with the Abb6 de Saint-Pierre's institutionalist plan
to secure a "Perpetual Peace," and closed with Kant's.38 Post-World War II
realism and liberal internationalism are but the latest incarnations of realist
and idealist thought, and neither, as I suggested above, has much to say about
fundamental transformation today.39
The concept of postmodernity also has been projected beyond the cultural
realm, into the political economy, initially by Marxist analysts. Frederic
Jameson led the way.40 For Jameson, postmodernism depicts "the third great
original expansion of capitalism around the globe (after the earlier expansions
of the national market and the older imperialist system)." The production and
manipulation of signs, images, and information are the raw materials of this
new "mode of production" as well as the means by which its expansion is
achieved. But this is an expansion, Jameson suggests, that in effect "internalizes":
just as the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles or the Eaton Center in Toronto
seeks to internalize its exterior, aspiring "to be a total space, a complete world,
a kind of miniature city," so too does global capitalism today internalize within
its own institutional forms relationships that previously took place among
distinct national capitals. This results in a "postmodern hyperspace," as
35. See David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New
York: Poseidon Press, 1991).
36. See M.S. Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 1713-1783 (London: Longmans, 1963).
37. Martin Wight, "The Balance of Power and International Order," in Alan James, ed., The
Bases of Intemational Order (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 98.
38. F. H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace (London: Cambridge University Press, 1963),
chaps. 2 and 4.
39. In a certain sense, James Rosenau's recent book touches on this cultural category of the
postmodernist debate. The major driving force of international transformation today, Rosenau
contends, consists of new sensibilities and capacities of individuals: "with their analytical skills
enlarged and their orientations toward authority more self-conscious, today's persons-in-the street
are no longer as uninvolved, ignorant, and manipulable with respect to world affairs as were their
forebears.... [T]he enlargements of the capacities of citizens is the primary prerequisite for global
turbulence." See Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics, pp. 13 and 15.
40. See Frederic Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left
Review 146 (July/August 1984), pp. 53-92; and "Marxism and Postmodernism," New Left Review
176 (July/August 1989), pp. 31-45.
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Territoriality 147
Jameson terms it, a heteronomy of fragments which nevertheless remains
unified by virtue of expressing the logic of late capitalism.41
Several other works of this genre have elaborated on Jameson's notions of a
postmodern capitalist mode of production and its consequences.42 They
resonate at a superficial level with the brief description of global microeconomic
changes at the outset of this article, as well as with the images of
spaceship earth, global warming, nuclear winters, and the like, by means of
which the ecosphere is popularly visualized. But, they remain silent on the issue
of the state and the system of states, which in the end is not surprising in light of
the fact that they are cast in a modes-of-production framework.
Nevertheless, these works are suggestive at a deeper level in their emphasis
on the space-time implosion experienced by advanced capitalist societies.
Harvey notes that "space and time are basic categories of human existence. Yet
we rarely debate their meanings; we tend to take them for granted, and give
them common-sense or self-evident attributions."43 Ultimately, he contends,
the current transformation in capitalist production relations is merely one
specific expression of a reconfiguration in social space-time experiences to a
degree not witnessed since the Renaissance. Harvey concurs with Jameson,
however, that "we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this
new hyperspace,... in part because our perceptual habits were formed in that
older kind of space I have called the space of high modernism."44
And so the postmodernist debate has shifted in barely two decades from
the domain of aesthetics, to culture more broadly, to political economy.
Correspondingly, the meaning of "modern" in "postmodern" has shifted from
what it is in modern art, the modern novel, or modern architecture, first, to
the so-called age of Enlightenment; next, to the structure of capitalist
production relations; and then to the very epoch in Western history that was
initiated by the Renaissance. It is the last of these space-time frames that
concerns me here, because it also marks the transformation that produced the
modern mode of organizing political space: the system of territorial states.
However, since no perceptual equipment exists, as Jameson remarks, through
41. The quotations are from Jameson, "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism," pp. 80 and 81.
42. The most comprehensive work is David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodemity (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1989). For a detailed empirical study of the relationship between global capital and
the reconfiguration of urban spaces, see Manuel Castells, The Informational City (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1989). Marxist theorists of postmodernity encounter an inherent contradiction, to
borrow their term, by the very nature of the enterprise. One of the features of postmodernity on
which virtually all other schools of thought agree is that it invalidates the possibility of producing
metanarratives, or metarecits, more fashionably-that "totalizing" and "logocentric" practice of
modernity on which Lyotard urges us to wage war. Of course, few narratives are more "meta" than
Marxism. Jameson's somewhat feeble response, in "Marxism and Postmodernism," is that a system
that produces fragments is still a system.
43. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 201.
44. Ibid.
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148 International Organization
which to grasp what he calls "global hyperspace," I hope to advance our
understanding of the possible rearticulation of international political space by
looking for clues to the past to discover how the modern political form itself
was produced.
Modern territoriality
Historically, the self-conscious use of the term "modern" to denote "now"
dates from the sixteenth century.45 The epochal sense of modern to denote
"modernity" dates from the eighteenth century, when the threshold demarcating
its beginning was put at roughly 1500.46 Writing in the eighteenth century,
Lord Bolinbroke defined an epoch by the chain of events being so broken "as to
have little or no real or visible connexion with that which we see continue....
[T]he end of the fifteenth century seems to be just such a period as I have been
describing, for those who live in the eighteenth, and who inhabit the western
parts of Europe."47
One of the chains in which visible connection to the past was ruptured was
the organization of political space. The fact of that rupture is well enough
known. But, what, if any, categories and modes of analysis does it suggest for
the study of international transformation more generally? To that, the main
task of this article, I now turn.
Differentiation
Let us begin at the very beginning: politics is about rule. Adapting a
formulation by Anthony Giddens, we can define the most generic attribute of
any system of rule as comprising legitimate dominion over a spatial extension.48
I use the term "spatial extension" advisedly, to drive home the point that it
need not assume the form of territorial states. The social facticity of any spatial
extension in turn implies some mode of differentiating human collectivities
from one another. By this I do not mean the progressive structural differentiation
that was long a staple of macrosociological theorizing and which is now
thoroughly discredited.49 Instead, I mean the notion of differentiation that
John Locke had in mind when he asked "how men might come to have a
45. Raymond Williams, "When was Modernism?" New Left Review 175 (May/June 1989), pp.
48-52.
46. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 243.
47. Cited in Martin Wight, Systems of States (Leicester, England: Leicester University Press,
1977), p. 111.
48. Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, vol. 1 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1981), p. 45.
49. See, for instance, Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New
York: Russell Sage, 1985).
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Territoriality 149
property in several parts of that which God gave to mankind in common."50
There are at least three ways in which prior or other systems of rule have
differed in this regard from the modern territorial state.
First, systems of rule need not be territorial at all. That is to say, the basis on
which the human species is socially individuated and individuals, in turn, are
bound together into collectivities can take (and historically has taken) forms
other than territoriality. For example, anthropologists quaintly used to characterize
as "primitive government" those systems of rule wherein the spatial
extension was demarcated on the basis of kinship. Moreover, they held that a
critical stage in societal evolution was precisely the shift from consanguinity to
contiguity as the relevant spatial parameter.51 To be sure, territory was occupied
in kin-based systems, but it did not define them.
Second, systems of rule need not be territorially fixed. Owen Lattimore's
work on nomadic property rights is of relevance here.52 Writing of Mongol
tribes, Lattimore pointed out that no single pasture would have had much value
for them because it soon would have become exhausted. Hence, driven by what
Lattimore called the "the sovereign importance of movement," the tribes
wandered, herding their livestock. But, they did not wander haphazardly:
"They laid claim to definite pastures and to the control of routes of migration
between these pastures."53 Accordingly, "the right to move prevailed over the
right to camp. Ownership meant, in effect, the title to a cycle of migration."54
The cycle was tribally owned and administered by the prince.
Third, even where systems of rule are territorial, and even where territoriality
is relatively fixed, the prevailing concept of territory need not entail mutual
exclusion. The archetype of nonexclusive territorial rule, of course, is medieval
Europe, with its "patchwork of overlapping and incomplete rights of
government,"55 which were "inextricably superimposed and tangled," and in
which "different juridical instances were geographically interwoven and stratified,
and plural allegiances, asymmetrical suzerainties and anomalous enclaves
50. John Locke, "On Property," in the second of the Two Treatises of Govemment, sec. 2.25,
Thomas I. Cook, ed. (New York: Hafner, 1947), p. 134. Luhman has developed a nonteleological
formulation of differentiation that I have found useful in which he distinguishes among
segmentation, functional differentiation, and stratification, with segmentation having an obvious
temporal priority. See Niklas Luhman, The Differentiation of Society, trans. Stephen Holmes and
Charles Larmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). I use the term here in the sense of
segmentation.
51. The classic statement of the traditional anthropological view is found in Lewis Henry
Morgan,Ancient Society, first published in 1877; a reprinted edition was edited by Eleanor Leacock
(Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963). For a contemporary discussion, see Jonathan Haas, The
Evolution of the Prehistoric State (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
52. See Owen Lattimore's works Inner Asian Frontiers of China (London: Oxford University
Press, 1940) and Studies in Frontier History (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).
53. Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History, p. 535.
54. Lattimore, InnerAsian Frontiers of China, p. 66.
55. Joseph R. Strayer and Dana C. Munro, The Middle Ages (New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts,
1959), p. 115. See also Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modem State
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), passim.
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150 International Organization
abounded."56 The difference between the medieval and modern worlds is
striking in this respect.57
Briefly put, the spatial extension of the medieval system of rule was
structured by a nonexclusive form of territoriality, in which authority was both
personalized and parcelized within and across territorial formations and for
which inclusive bases of legitimation prevailed. The notion of firm boundary
lines between the major territorial formations did not take hold until the
thirteenth century; prior to that date, there were only "frontiers," or large
zones of transition.58 The medieval ruling class was mobile in a manner not
dreamed of since, able to assume governance from one end of the continent to
the other without hesitation or difficulty because "public territories formed a
continuum with private estates."59 In this connection, Georges Duby writes,
wryly, of Henry Plantagenet: "This was Henry, count of Anjou on his father's
side, duke of Normandy on his mother's, duke of Aquitaine by marriage, and
for good measure-but only for good measure-king of England, although this
was of no concern to the country in which he spent the best part of his time."60
In addition, the medieval system of rule was legitimated by common bodies of
law, religion, and custom expressing inclusive natural rights. Nevertheless,
these inclusive legitimations posed no threat to the integrity of the constituent
political units because these units viewed themselves as municipal embodiments
of a universal moral community.61 Hence the "heteronomous shackles,"
in Friedrich Meinecke's words, on the autonomy-indeed, on the very ability of
thinkers to formulate the concept-of the state.62
56. The quotations are from Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left
Books, 1974), pp. 37 and 37-38, respectively.
57. I have explored these differences at greater length in John Gerard Ruggie, "Continuity and
Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis," World Politics 35 (January
1983), pp. 261-85. Markus Fischer has recently claimed that I and other theorists who find fault
with neorealism's inability to capture the phenomenon of transformation "imply" or "would
expect" medieval life to have been more harmonious and less conflictual than modern international
relations. Certainly in my case the claim is entirely fictitious, backed only by Fischer citing a
sentence in my article that had nothing to do with this point and linking it to what he "would
expect" me to have said. See Markus Fischer, "Feudal Europe, 800-1300: Communal Discourse
and Conflictual Practices," Intemational Organization 46 (Spring 1992), pp. 427-66; the questionable
reference is cited in his footnote 12.
58. According to Edouard Perroy, as paraphrased by Wallerstein, this was "the 'fundamental
change' in the political structure of Europe." See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modem World
System, vol. 1 (New York: Academic Press, 1974), p. 32. An extended discussion of the difference
between borders and frontier zones may be found in Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History. See also
Friedrich Kratochwil, "Of Systems, Boundaries and Territoriality," World Politics 34 (October
1986), pp. 27-52.
59. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, p. 32.
60. Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 286.
61. Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1964), p. 41 and
passim.
62. Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism, trans. Douglas Scott (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1957). The term is attributed to Meinecke by Scott in his introduction to the b
which was first published in 1924.
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Territoriality 151
The antonym of Meinecke's term is "homonomous."63 The distinctive
signature of the modern-homonomous-variant of structuring territorial
space is the familiar world of territorially disjoint, mutually exclusive, functionally
similar, sovereign states.
The chief characteristic of the modern system of territorial rule is the
consolidation of all parcelized and personalized authority into one public
realm. This consolidation entailed two fundamental spatial demarcations:
between public and private realms and between internal and external realms.64
The public sphere was constituted by the monopolization on the part of central
authorities of the legitimate use of force. Internally, this monopolization was
expressed through the progressive imposition of what was called the "king's
peace," or the sole right of the king's authority to enforce the law. As Norbert
Elias notes, this idea was "very novel in a society in which originally a whole
class of people could use weapons and physical violence according to their
means and inclinations."65 Externally, the monopolization of the legitimate use
of force was expressed in the sovereign right to make war. Philippe Contamine
has put it well: "' The king's war' and 'the kingdom's war' must, in the end, be
identical."66 Finally, the inclusive bases of legitimation that had prevailed in the
medieval world, articulated in divine and natural law, yielded to the doctrine of
sovereignty, and jus gentium slowly gave way tojus intergentes.
To summarize, politics is about rule. And, the distinctive feature of the
modern system of rule is that it has differentiated its subject collectivity into
territorially defined, fixed, and mutually exclusive enclaves of legitimate
dominion. As such, it appears to be unique in human history.67 Without the
63. The term "heteronomous" refers to systems wherein the parts are subject to different
biological laws or modes of growth and "homonomous" to systems wherein they are subject to the
same laws or modes of growth; see The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed. s.v. "heteronomous" and
"homonomous." In the original, biological sense of the terms, the fingers on a hand would exhibit
homonomous growth-for a current international relations meaning, read "all states are
functionally alike"-and the heart and hands of the same body heteronomous growth-read "all
states are functionally different."
64. According to Perry Anderson, "the age in which 'Absolutist' public authority was imposed
was also simultaneously the age in which 'absolute' private property was progressively consolidated";
see Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, p. 429. Eric Jones reaches a similar conclusion via a
different route: "Productive activities that had been subject to collective controls were becoming
individualized. This is a staple of the textbooks. But that Europe moved from the guilds and the
common fields toward laissez-faire is only half the story. The missing half is that just when production w
becoming fully privatised, services were becoming more of a collective concern, or where they were
already communal, now the government was being involved." See E. L. Jones, The European Miracle.
Environments, Economics, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), p. 147. Jones is referring to the provision of such services as internal pacification,
internal colonization of uncultivated lands, disaster management, and the like. The gradual differentiation
between internal and external, as seen through the lens of changing norms and practices of diplomatic
representation, is portrayed brilliantly by Mattingly in Renaissance Diplomacy.
65. Norbert Elias, Power and Civility (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 202.
66. Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, trans. Michael Jones (New York: Basil
Blackwell, 1984), p. 169.
67. For a sophisticated survey, see Robert David Sack, Human Teritoriality: Its Theory and
History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
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152 International Organization
concept of differentiation, then, it is impossible to define the structure of
modernity in international politics-modes of differentiation are nothing less
than the focus of the epochal study of rule. Hence the supreme irony of Waltz's
continued insistence that the dimension of differentiation "drops out" from the
neorealist model of international structure.68
The obvious next issue to address is how one accounts for this peculiar form
of sociopolitical individuation. Now, providing an account of things in contemporary
international relations research typically means specifying their causes.
That in turn requires that we have a theory-in this case, a theory of
international transformation. But we have no such theory. As I have suggested,
we can barely even describe transformation in the international polity. Hence, I
mean something far less ambitious by the phrase "providing an account of."
The modern system of states is socially constructed. The issue I mean to
address is simply what were the raw materials that people used and drew upon
in constructing it? I find that developments in three dimensions of European
collective experience were particularly salient, and that the three dimensions
are irreducible to one another: namely, material environments, strategic
behavior, and social epistemology.
Material environments
The study of the longue duree has become a special province of the Annales
school of historiography.69 The starting point of the Annales approach is the
"ecodemographic" dimension of human collectivities, on the premise that it
poses the biggest long-term challenge for social structures. It then moves on to
various constructed environments and patterns of routine social practices. If we
were to view the emergence of the modern mode of structuring territorial space
from the vantage point of this perspective, what sorts of developments would
catch our eye?
Consider the material side of life throughout the thirteenth and into the
fourteenth century: human ecology, the relations of production, and the
relations of force. Climatologically, the early phase of the period remained
favored by the so-called little optimum of the early Middle Ages.70 Population
grew markedly. Land clearing, draining, and diking progressed rapidly,
increasing the size of the cultivated area and breaking down barriers to
68. Waltz, inexplicably, views the differentiation of a collectivity into its constituent units to be
an attribute of the units rather than of the collectivity. His original argument is in Theory of
Intemational Politics, chap. 5; and a defense of his position can be found in Kenneth Waltz,
"Reflections on Theory of Intemational Politics: A Response to My Critics," in Robert 0. Keohan
ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
69. The exemplar of this school, of course, is Fernand Braudel; his general approach is discussed
in Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
70. David Herlihy, "Ecological Conditions and Demographic Change," in Richard L. De Molen,
ed., One Thousand Years: Westem Europe in the Middle Ages (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p.
13. See also Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's classic study, Times of Feast, Times of Famine:A History of
Climate Since the Year 1000, trans. Barbara Bray (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971).
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Territoriality 153
communication within territorial formations while expanding their external
frontiers.7' Although the overwhelming proportion of the population continued
to live in rural areas, medieval cities grew, and some (Milan, Paris, Venice)
may have reached 150,000 inhabitants.72
A sustained economic expansion took place as well. Productivity increased;
more and more goods were produced for sale or exchange; and trade revived,
not merely in luxury goods but increasingly in staples. That last point is crucial.
In the words of Eric Jones, "the peculiarities of European trade arose because
of the opportunities of the environment. Climate, geology and soils varied
greatly from place to place. The portfolio of resources was extensive, but not
everything was found in the same place."73 Moreover, economic relations
became increasingly monetized, and developments in "invisibles," including
the great fairs, shipping, insurance, and financial services, further lubricated
commerce and helped to create a European-wide market.74
In the realm of force, the feudal cavalry was coming to be undermined by the
longbow, pike, and crossbow and the feudal castle, subsequently, by gunpowder.75
The monetization of economic relations, together with the commutation
of feudal services into money payments, made it possible for territorial rulers to
retain mercenaries. Generating revenue through taxation augmented the trend
toward standing armies. The more effective internal pacification produced
thereby provided a more secure economic environment, which in turn increased
both private and public returns.76
Nevertheless, territorially defined, territorially fixed, and mutually exclusive
state formations did not emerge at this point. It was not that simple. What
happened instead was that this period of expansion and diversification was
arrested suddenly and ferociously in the mid-fourteenth century. Famines,
wars, and plagues decimated the population of Europe, reducing it by at least
one-third and probably more. Entire localities disappeared; deserted lands
reverted to heaths and swamps. The economy went into a deep and seemingly
permanent depression and pillaging, robbing, and civil unrest again became
endemic. Recovery did not return until the second half of the fifteenth
century.77
71. Jones, The European Miracle, chap. 4.
72. According to Herlihy, even in the most densely populated areas, northern Italy and
Flanders, three out of four people continued to live in the countryside; elsewhere this proportion
was roughly nine out of ten. See Herlihy, "Ecological Conditions and Demographic Change," p. 30.
For a more elaborate discussion of the structures and functions of towns in premodern Europe, see
Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000-1950 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), chaps. 1-3.
73. Jones, The European Miracle, p. 90.
74. See ibid, chap. 5; Herlihy, "Ecological Conditions and Demographic Change"; and Elias,
Power and Civility. Elias explores the importance of monetization not only for economic but also for
political development.
75. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power, chap. 3.
76. See ibid.; Elias, Power and Civility; and Jones, The European Miracle, chap. 7.
77. Surely the most readable account of this period is Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The
Calamitous 14th Century (New York: Ballantine, 1978). For a standard history, see Denys Hays,
Europe in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, 2d ed. (London: Longman, 1989).
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154 International Organization
These changes in the material world, both positive and negative, were so
profound, however, that existing social arrangements were strained to the point
of collapse.
Strategic behavior
Indeed, economic growth and diversification from the thirteenth to the
fourteenth century had encountered institutional limits well before they were
snuffed out by the Black Death and the Hundred Years' War. These limits
included the feudal structure of property rights and forms of labor control;
inadequate investment, especially in agriculture; the maze of secular and
ecclesiastical jurisdictional constraints that pervaded medieval society; and the
socially parasitic nature of the multiplicity of territorial rulers. One way to
characterize the impact of the material changes discussed above on the
prevailing institutional order is to say that they altered the matrix of constraints
and opportunities for social actors, giving rise to different situations of strategic
interaction among them. This is the subject matter of the "new economic
history."78 Consider the following illustrations.
First, the drastic demographic declines of the fourteenth century affected
relative factor prices, favoring agricultural workers and industrial producers
while disadvantaging the land-owning class-the very basis of feudal society.
Second, as Jones has argued, the fourteenth-century calamities created
opportunities for "entrepreneurial politicians" to prove their social utility by
providing a variety of social services, ranging from disaster relief to more
effective institutional arrangements for the conduct of commerce. According to
Jones, the forces favoring institutional change responded more imaginatively to
the calamities than the forces that sought to impede it.79
A third example involves the relationship between medieval juridical
authorities and the trade fairs-a relationship that in some respects resembles
that between the transnational economy and national jurisdictions today. The
medieval trade fairs were encouraged by local lords; some took place only a
stone's throw from the feudal castle. The fairs were favored for the simple
reason that they generated revenue. In the case of the famous Champagne
fairs, 0. Verlinden writes that revenues were gained from "taxes on the
78. For the purposes of the present discussion, the pathbreaking work is the brief book by
Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
79. See Jones, The European Miracle, chap. 7. Perhaps the drollest illustration cited by Jones, but
nonetheless a significant one, actually comes from a later century, when the Austrian Hapsburgs
built a cordon sanitaire some 1,000 miles long, promising to shut out the plague that persisted in the
Ottoman empire. Their feat had little epidemiological effect, but it called forth considerable
administrative effort and social mobilization and contributed, thereby, to statebuilding. Douglass
North and his colleagues have produced a fascinating formulation of the process whereby
innovations in contracts were created and enforced; see Paul R. Milgrom, Douglass C. North, and
Barry R. Weingast, "The Role of Institutions in the Revival of Trade: The Law Merchant, Private
Judges, and the Champagne Fairs," Economics and Politics 2 (March 1990), pp. 1-23.
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Territoriality 155
residences and stalls of the merchants, entry and exit tolls, levies on sales and
purchases, dues upon weights and measures, justice and safe-conduct charges
upon the Italians and Jews."80 Moreover, local lords at any time could have
closed down a fair in their domain-much as states today can close down
offshore markets or even shoot down communication satellites-though other
lords in other places probably would have been only too pleased to provide
alternatives sites.
In no sense could the medieval trade fairs have become substituts for the
institutions of feudal rule. Yet, the fairs contributed significantly to the demise
of feudal authority relations. They did so because the new wealth they
produced, the new instruments of economic transactions they generated, the
new ethos of commerce they spread, the new regulatory arrangements they
required, and the expansion of cognitive horizons they effected all helped
undermine the personalistic ties and the modes of reasoning on which feudal
authority rested. As Marvin Becker has put it, the medieval trade fairs were a
place in which "the exchange system was freed from rules and rituals."'81 Like
the exchange system, the system of governance also ultimately became
unraveled. Once momentum shifted from fairs to towns, greater institutional
substitutability did come to exist because, in the words of a medieval maxim,
"Town air brings freedom"-that is to say, the towns actually exercised
jurisdiction over and evoked the allegiance of their new inhabitants.82
Fourth and finally, Hendrik Spruyt recently has shown that the erosion of the
medieval system of rule, the growth of trade, and the rise of the towns triggered
new coalitional possibilities among kings, the aristocracy, and the towns.
Indeed, Spruyt explains the pattern in political forms that succeeded medieval
rule-territorial states in some places, city-states in others, and city-leagues
elsewhere still-by the specific nature of the coalitions that formed.83 In short,
the exogenous shocks of the fourteenth century fundamentally strained the
existing social order and created a new matrix of constraints and opportunities
for social actors.
Some of the new economic historians want to go further, however, to imply
80. 0. Verlinden, "Markets and Fairs," Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 3
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 127. Verlinden also points out another possible
analogue to the present situation, namely that "from the middle of the thirteenth century onwards,
money-changing [in the fairs] begins to take precedence over trade" (see p. 133). Also see
Robert-Henri Bautier, The Economic Development of Medieval Europe, trans. Heather Karolyi
(London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), chap. 4.
81. Marvin B. Becker, Medieval Italy: Constraints and Creativity (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1981), p. 15. See also the excellent review article of Becker's book by Janet Coleman,
"The Civic Culture of Contracts and Credit," Comparative Study of Society and History 28 (October
1986), pp. 778-84.
82. The original quotation is "Stadtluft macht frei," and is found in Fritz Rorig, The Medieval
Town (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 27. See also Jacques Le Goff, "The Town
as an Agent of Civilization," in Carlo M. Cipolla, ed. The Middle Ages (London: Harvester Press,
1976).
83. Hendrik Spruyt, "The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems
Change," Ph.D. diss., Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego, 1991.
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156 International Organization
that the modern system of states resulted directly from this process because the
state represented the optimal size of political units that was required to provide
efficient property rights and physical security. Smaller units simply "had to
grow," Douglass North and Robert Thomas contend.84 In the economic realm,
this drive for juridical expansion is said to have come, on the demand side, from
a desire for efficient property rights, which would reduce the discrepancy
between private and social rates of return. On the supply side, expansion, they
argue, was driven by the fiscal interests of rulers for higher revenues.85 In the
security realm, new weapons technology and a shift in advantage to the offense
allegedly drove the desire for larger and fiscally more capable political
formations.86
The theory that the modern state was functionally determined in this manner
has at least two serious shortcomings. First, its retrodictive value is severely
limited: centralizing monarchies emerged in the west, to be sure; but city-states
were consolidating in Italy and principalities as well as city-leagues in
Germany, thus preventing their formation into larger (and by the logic of the
new economic history, presumably more efficient) political units. Meanwhile,
eastern Europe merely sank back into the somnambulance of another round of
serfdom. Moreover, as Spruyt demonstrates, two other successor forms to the
medieval system of rule, the Italian city-states and the Hanse, in fact were
viable political alternatives to the territorial state, fully able to levy taxes and
raise armies, for the better part of two centuries.87 In social life, two centuries is
no mere time lag.
Second, there is a substantial logical and empirical gap between the
existence of some functional pressure for political units to grow, and their
blossoming specifically into a system of territorially defined, territorially fixed,
and mutually exclusive state formations. To assert that the specificities of the
modern state system also were functionally determined entails a claim of
staggering historical and intellectual proportions, which the new economic
history cannot vindicate. We shall now see why.
84. North and Thomas, The Rise of the Western World, p. 17.
85. See ibid; and Jones, The European Miracle.
86. See McNeill, The Pursuit of Power.
87. For a more elaborate summary of prevailing patterns of state forms, see Charles Tilly,
"Reflections on the History of European State-making," in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of
National States in Westem Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Prinston University Press, 1975), pp. 3-83. Tilly
points out a methodological problem that the "new economic historians" gloss over: there are
many more failures than successes in the history of European state building. "The disproportionate
distribution of success and failure puts us in the unpleasant situation of dealing with an experience
in which most of the cases are negative, while only the positive cases are well-documented" (p. 39).
Tilly explores a greater variety of state-building experiences in his most recent work, Coercion,
Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990. Spruyt's methodological critique is even more
damning, however. He points out that because successor forms to the medieval system of rule other
than territorial states have been systematically excluded from consideration, there is no fundamental
variation in units on the dependent-variable side in theories of state building. See Spruyt, "The
Soverign State and its Competitors."
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Territoriality 157
Social epistemes
Michael Walzer points the way. "The state," he once wrote, "is invisible; it
must be personified before it can be seen, symbolized before it can be loved,
imagined before it can be conceived."88 The process whereby a society first
comes to imagine itself, to conceive of appropriate orders of rule and exchange,
to symbolize identities, and to propagate norms and doctrines is neither
materially determined, as vulgar Marxists used to claim, nor simply a matter of
instrumental rationality, as the irrepressible utilitarians would have it.
German social theorists in a line from Max Weber to Jurgen Habermas have
viewed society as comprising webs of meaning and signification. In the French
tradition, from Durkheim to Foucault, there has been a continuing exploration
of mentalites collectives. No single concept captures both sets of concerns, the
one being more semiotic, the other more structural. For lack of a better term, I
shall refer to their combination as expressing the "epistemic" dimension of
social life, and to any prevailing configuration of its constituent elements as a
"social episteme."89 The demise of the medieval system of rule and the rise of
the modern resulted in part from a transformation in social epistemology. Put
simply, the mental equipment that people drew upon in imagining and
symbolizing forms of political community itself underwent fundamental change.
At the doctrinal level, students of international law and organization have
long noted the impact on the concept of sovereignty of the novel religious
principle cujus regio ejus religio, which placed the choice between Protestantis
and Catholicism in the hands of local rulers, and the corresponding secular
principle Rex in regno suo est Imperator regni sui, which stipulated that the
political standing of territorial rulers in their domains was identical to that of
the Emperor in his.90 Sir Ernest Barker exclaimed that in these two phrases "we
may hear the cracking of the Middle Ages."91 Moreover, the rediscovery of the
concept of absolute and exclusive private property from Roman law no doubt
aided in formulating the concept of absolute and exclusive sovereignty.92
At the deeper level of political metaphysics, historians of political thought
have long noted the impact on the emerging self-image held by European
territorial rulers of a new model of social order: a view of society as a collection
88. Michael Walzer, "On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought," Political Science
Quarterly 82 (June 1967), p. 194.
89. With due apologies, I adapt the latter term from Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New
York: Random House, 1970).
90. See, for example, Leo Gross, "The Peace of Westphalia, 1648-1948," in Richard A. Falk and
Wolfram Hanrieder, eds., International Law and Organization (Philadelphia, Penn.: Lippincott,
1968); and F. H. Hinsley, "The Concept of Sovereignty and the Relations between States," Journal
of International Affairs, vol. 21, no. 2, 1967, pp. 242-52.
91. Cited by Gross, "The Peace of Westphalia," pp. 56-57.
92. Berki writes that " 'private' . . . refers not so much to the nature of the entity that owns, but
to the fact that it is an entity, a unit whose ownership of nature ... signifies the exclusion of others
from this ownership." See R. N. Berki, "On Marxian Thought and the Problem of International
Relations," World Politics 24 (October 1971), pp. 80-105. On the relationship between private
property and sovereignty, see Ruggie, "Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity."
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158 International Organization
of atomistic and autonomous bodies-in-motion in a field of forces energized
solely by scarcity and ambition. This is a view within which such distinctively
modern theorists as Machiavelli and subsequently Hobbes framed their
thinking.93
It may be possible to claim, though I think hard to vindicate, that both the
doctrinal and perhaps even the metaphysical changes were determined by
power and greed, or by "efficiency" considerations, to use the more clinical
term favored in the literature today. However, the new forms of spatial
differentiation on which the novel political doctrines and metaphysics were
constructed are another matter: their specifically political expressions mirrored
a much broader transformation in social epistemology that reached well
beyond the domains of political and economic life.
Consider, for example, analogous changes in the linguistic realm, such as the
growing use of vernaculars, and the coming to dominance of the "I-form" of
speech-which Franz Borkenau described as "the sharpest contradistinction
between I and you, between me and the world."94 Consider analogous changes
in interpersonal sensibilities, as in new notions of individual subjectivity and
new meanings of personal delicacy and shame. These changes, among other
effects, led to a spatial reconfiguration of households, from palaces to manor
houses to the dwellings of the urban well-to-do, which more rigorously
demarcated and separated private from public spheres and functions.95
93. See Walzer, "On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought"; Sheldon Wolin, Politics and
Vision (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960); C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive
Individualism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962); and J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian
Moment (Princeton, N.J.; Princeton University Press, 1975).
94. On the use of vernacular, see Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the
Book, trans. David Gerard, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton, eds. (London: Verso,
1984), especially chapter 8, which contains interesting statistics on books in print by subject and
language. On the I-form of speech, see Franz Borkenau, End and Beginning: On the Generations of
Cultures and the Origins of the West, Richard Lowenthal, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press,
1981).
95. Changing sensibilities are illustrated and analyzed at length by Norbert Elias, The Civilizing
Process (New York: Urizen Books, 1978). To illustrate only one aspect of medieval household
organization as late as the fourteenth century, consider the following excerpts from Tuchman, A
Distant Mirror: "Even kings and popes received ambassadors sitting on beds furnished with
elaborate curtains and spreads" (p. 161); "Even in greater homes guests slept in the same room
with host and hostess" (p. 161), and often servants and children did too (p. 39); "Never was man
less alone.... Except for hermits and recluses, privacy was unknown" (p. 39). See also David
Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); and Georges
Duby, ed., A History of Private Life, vol. 2, Revelations of the Medieval World, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1988). Martines documents that "Francesco di Giorgio
Martini (1439-1502)-the Sienese engineer, architect, painter, sculptor, and writer-was one of
the first observers to urge that the houses of merchants and small tradesmen be constructed with a
clean separation between the rooms intended for family use and those for the conduct of business."
See Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York: Vintage
Books, 1979), p. 271. Finally, the differentiation between person and office also evolved during this
period. As Strong notes, "the possibility that one human being could separately be both a human
being and a king-a notion on which our conception of office depends-is first elaborated by
Hobbes in his distinction between natural and artificial beings in the Leviathan." See Tracy Strong,
"Dramaturgical Discourse and Political Enactments: Toward an Artistic Foundation for Political
Space," in Stanley Lyman and Richard Brown, eds., Structure, Consciousness, and History (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 240.
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Territoriality 159
Arguably, the single most important of those developments occurred in the
visual arts: the invention of single-point perspective. Previous visual representation
exhibited two spatial characteristics. First, artists rendered their subjects
from different sides and angles "rather than from a single, overall vantage."96
Second, variation in figure scale was determined by the symbolic or social
importance of the person or object represented and "not by any principle of
optical inversion."97 As Harold Osborne explains, in single-point perspective
(the invention of which is generally credited to Filippo Brunelleschi about
1425) "the pictorial surface is regarded as a transparent vertical screen, placed
between the artist and his subject, on which he traces the outlines [of the visual
field] as they appear from a single fixed viewpoint. "98 The corollary to the fixed
viewpoint, from which the world is seen, is the horizon vanishing point, at which
objects recede out of view.
By virtue of this development, precision and perspective became prized;
Brunelleschi, for example, also made major contributions to optics and
cartography. But of greatest significance is the fact that this was precision and
perspective from a particular point of view: a single point of view, the point of
view of a single subjectivity, from which all other subjectivities were differentiated
and against which all other subjectivities were plotted in diminishing size
and depth toward the vanishing point.
If there is one common element in the various expressions of differentiation
that we have been discussing, this novel perspectival form surely is it. Every
civilization tends to have its own particular perspective, Edgerton concludes in
his classic study, its own dominant symbolic form for conceiving and perceiving
space, and single-point perspective "was the peculiar answer of the
Renaissance."99 What was true in the visual arts was equally true in politics:
political space came to be defined as it appeared from a single fixed viewpoint.
The concept of sovereignty, then, was merely the doctrinal counterpart of the
application of single-point perspectival forms to the spatial organization of
politics.'00
This transformation in the spatial organization of politics was so profoundliterally
mind-boggling-that contemporaries had great difficulty grasping its
full implications for many years to come. Mattingly, for example, recounts the
96. Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic
Books, 1975), p. 9.
97. John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 103.
98. Harold Osborne, Oxford Companion to Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p.
840, emphasis added.
99. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, p. 158.
100. Marshall McLuhan made several offhand remarks in The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1962) about an alleged parallel between single-point perspective and
nationalism. He thereby misdated the advent of nationalism by several centuries, however. Moreover, he
was less concerned with developing the parallel than with attributing its cause to the cognitive impact of
the medium of movable print. Nevertheless, I have found McLuhan's thinking enormously
suggestive. The relationship between changing perspectival forms and the organization of cities
and towns is explored extensively in the literature; see, among other works, Martines, Power and
Imagination; and Giulio C. Argan, The Renaissance City (New York: George Braziller, 1969).
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160 International Organization
efforts of Francis I as late as 1547 to reform the apparatus of the French state
by fixing the number of secretaires d'Etat at four. Rather than separating their
duties according to the logical distinction, by modern standards, between
domestic and foreign relations, each of the four was assigned one quadrant of
France and the relations with all contiguous and outlying states.10'
To conclude, material changes may have awakened both a need and a desire
for this broad transformation in the prevailing social episteme, which produced
fundamentally new spatial forms. And entrepreneurial rulers could and did try
to exploit those new images and ideas to advance their interests. Nevertheless,
the breadth and depth of these changes argue, at the very least, in favor of a
relative autonomy for the realm of social epistemology. Walzer has put it well:
"If symbolization does not by itself create unity (that is the function of political
practice as well as of symbolic activity), it does create units-units of discourse
which are fundamental to all thinking and doing, units of feeling around which
emotions of loyalty and assurance can cluster."'102
Accordingly, I turn next to the domain of social practice, wherein the new
unity was achieved. I highlight two aspects of it in particular: the process of
social empowerment, which facilitated the consolidation of territorial rule; and
the process of "unbundling" territoriality, which made it possible for the new
territorial states, who viewed their individual subjectivity as constituting a
self-sufficient moral and political field, to form a society of states.
Social empowerment
The disarticulation of the medieval system of rule meant that parametric
conditions would have to be fixed at three levels in the newly formed social
aggregations of power: the domestic social structure, the territorial formation,
and the collectivity of territorial units. In each case, the relative success of the
contending parties was shaped not simply by the material power they possessed
or the interests they pursued but also by a process of social empowerment that
reflected the ongoing transformation of social epistemes. I focus below on the
territorial state and its collectivity.103
101. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, p. 195.
102. Walzer, "On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought," pp. 194-95, emphasis original.
103. For a rich and provocative discussion of the process of social empowerment domestically,
see Albert 0. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: PoliticalArguments for Capitalism Before Its
Triumph (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977). As Hirschman puts it: "Weber claims
that capitalist behavior and activities were the indirect (and originally unintended) result of a
desperate search for individual salvation. My claim is that the diffusion of capitalist forms owed
much to an equally desperate search for a way of avoiding society's ruin, permanently threatening at
the time because of precarious arrangements for internal and external order" (p. 130, emphasis
original). Thus, according to Hirschman, the ultimate social power of the bourgeoisie benefited
from a shift in social values whereby commerce became socially more highly regarded-not
because of any perceived intrinsic merit or interest in commerce but for the discipline and the
restraint it was thought to impose on social behavior in a period of severe turbulence and grave
uncertainty. Cf. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (
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Territoriality 161
At the level of territorial state formations, the key parametric condition to be
fixed was precisely where in society (i.e., around which power aggregation) the
right to rule would crystallize. Let us return for a moment to the western
European monarchies around the middle of the fifteenth century. Their future
looked bleak. In Castile, whose king sometimes claimed the title Emperor, the
crown was among the weakest in all of Europe; the towns were dominant. In
Aragon, the towns were weak and the nobility was in control, pledging
allegiance to their king with this unimpressive oath: "We, who are as good as
you, swear to you, who are no better than we, to accept you as our king and
sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws: but if not,
not."'104 In France, the monarchy had to be saved in 1429 by a farmer's daughte
who was guided in her quest by visions and voices from "higher" sources; but
not even that intervention helped, and when the Hundred Years' War finally
ground to a halt more than two decades later, the country lay in ruins. England,
already weak and divided, became further torn by the deadly Wars of the
Roses. And so it went.
The turn came suddenly. By the end of the century, strong centralized
administration had "almost completely transformed the political life of western
and west-central Europe," in Johnson and Percy's words.105 The new political
units had become a palpable reality, no longer simply an aspiration, a trend, or
a struggle. In France, moreover, a weak central monarchy ended up absorbing a
stronger duchy of Burgundy in the process.
How can this shift be explained? One way to put it is that central rulers
became more powerful because of their state-building mission. A fundamental
shift was occurring in the purposes for which power could be deployed by rulers
and be regarded as socially legitimate by their subjects. Internally, legitimate
power became fused with the provision of public order, steadily discrediting its
deployment for primitive extraction and accumulation. Externally, legitimate
power became fused with statecraft, steadily discrediting its deployment for
primitive expansion and aggrandizement.106
This process of empowerment also helps to account for the geographical
pattern of successful centralizing efforts noted above. The monarchs in the west
tended to hitch their fate to those new objectives, and large-scale exclusive
state formations emerged. West-central Europe and Italy, on the other hand,
still had to cope with those meddlesome remnants of heteronomy, the Holy
Roman Empire and the Papacy. While they lacked the power to prevail, so long
York: Scribners, 1958). Additional support for Hirschman's argument may be found in Pocock, The
Machiavellian Moment: "It looks, then, as if Machiavelli was in search of social means whereby
men's natures might be transformed to the point where they became capable of citizenship"
(p. 193).
104. Jerah Johnson and William Percy, TheAge of Recovery: The Fifteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 56.
105. Ibid., p. 73.
106. See Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment; and Bernard Guenee, States and Rulers in Later
Medieval Europe, trans. Juliet Vale (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985).
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162 International Organization
as they retained some degree of social efficacy it remained difficult to formula
clearly the concept, let alone create the institution, of an exclusive state
formation. Here city-states and principalities became the expression of
homonomous territoriality. In the east, these social changes never took hold in
the first place. One should not exaggerate the ease with which these processes
took hold even in the western kingdoms. As Charles Tilly points out, the
leaders of prior institutions and even ordinary people "fought the claims of
central states for centuries," right into the seventeenth century.107 Over time,
however, the issue at stake increasingly became the terms of central rule, not
the fact of it.
At the level of the collectivity of states, the critical parameter to fix
concerned the right to act as a constitutive unit of the new collective political
order. The issue here was not who had how much power, but who could be
designated as a power.108 Such a designation inherently is a collective act. It
involved the mutual recognition of the new constitutive principle of sovereignty.
Martin Wight points out that "it would be impossible to have a society of
sovereign states unless each state, while claiming sovereignty for itself,
recognized that every other state had the right to claim and enjoy its own
sovereignty as well."'109 Reciprocal sovereignty thus became the basis of the new
international order.
To be sure, the new organizing principle of reciprocal sovereignty was
challenged in and hammered home by wars; but even in the evolution of
European wars we can see signs of that new principle of international
legitimacy taking hold. As already noted, private wars ceased to be tolerated,
and war making came to be universally recognized as an attribute of
sovereignty. Even more interesting, European warfare thereafter seems to
exhibit a progression in the dominant forms of war.1"0
The first form we might call "constitutive" war. Here the very ontology of the
units-that is to say, what kind of units they would be-was still at issue. The
Wars of Religion are the prime instance. As characterized by Reinhart
Koselleck, the Peace of Augsburg (1555) "meant that the fronts of religious
civil war were to be shut down, frozen in situ.""' It also produced a moral
compromise. As described by Koselleck: "The compromise, born of necessity,
concealed within itself a new principle, that of 'politics,' which was to set itself
107. Tilly, "Reflections on the History of European State-making," p. 22.
108. Richard K. Ashley, "The Poverty of Neorealism," International Organization 38 (Spring
1984), especially pp. 259 and 272-73.
109. Wight, Systems of States, p. 135.
110. Kaiser points out that all wars throughout the period I am here discussing had specific
political and economic objectives, but that prior to the eighteenth century they also exhibited very
complex overlays of other dimensions that have not been seen since. See David Kaiser, Politics and
War: European Conflictfrom Philip II to Hitler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990),
chap. 1. I am here attempting to capture and give expression to these other dimensions.
111. Kosellek, Futures Past, p. 8.
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Territoriality 163
in motion in the following century.""12 Still, an international politics morally
autonomous from the realm of religion did not become firmly established until
the Peace of Westphalia (1648), ending the Thirty Years' War.
This first phase was followed by warfare in which the nature of the units was
accepted but their territorial configuration remained contested. We might call
these "configurative" wars. The Wars of Succession of the early eighteenth
century-Spanish, Polish, and Austrian-and the Seven Years' War (1756-63)
illustrate this form. Among other factors, these conflicts revolved around the
principles of territorial contiguity versus transterritorial dynastic claims as the
basis for a viable balance of power. In the end, territorial contiguity won out, at
least in the European core.113
The third phase in the evolving form of warfare consists of the familiar
strategic and tactical wars ever since, wars that we might call "positional"interrupted
by periodic quests for universal empire, which have been successfully
repulsed on each occasion.1"4
Finally, when the concept of state sovereignty expanded to become the
concept of national sovereignty, the use of mercenaries in warfare declined and
ultimately was eliminated altogether. Armed forces subsequently became an
expression of the nation.1"5
The critical threshold in this transition was the passage from constitutive to
configurative wars, for it first acknowledged the principle of reciprocal
sovereignty. When all was said and done, Europe ended up with a great many
not-so-powerful states, including the nearly two hundred German principalities,
which could not possibly have vindicated their right to exist by means of
material power, but which were socially empowered by the collectivity of states
to act as its constitutive units.1"6
Thus, the process of social empowerment was part of the means by which the
new units of political discourse were inscribed in social life to produce new
units of political order.
112. Ibid.
113. See Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 1713-1783; and Kaiser, Politics and War.
114. Ludwig Dehio, The Precarious Balance (New York: Knopf, 1962). What Gilpin calls the
cycle of hegemonic wars does not contradict my point. As defined by Gilpin, a "hegemonic war"
concerns which power will be able to extract greater resources from and exercise greater control
over the system of states; neither the nature of the units nor the nature of the system, for that
matter, is at issue. In fact, Gilpin's description of the calculus of would-be hegemons suggests that
hegemonic wars fit well into my generic category of positional wars. See Robert Gilpin, War and
Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
115. For a good discussion of this development, see Janice E. Thomson, "State Practices,
International Norms, and the Decline of Mercenarism," International Studies Quarterly 34 (March
1990), pp. 23-47. On the emergence of national sovereignty, see Benedict Arnold, Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
116. Strang has demonstrated the impact of reciprocal sovereignty for the entire history of
European expansion into non-European territories since 1415. He finds that polities that were
recognized as sovereign have fared much better than those that were not. See David Strang,
"Anomaly and Commonplace in European Political Expansion: Realist and Institutionalist
Accounts," International Organization 45 (Spring 1991), pp. 143-62.
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164 International Organization
The paradox of absolute individuation
Our story ends in a paradox. Having established territorially fixed state
formations, having insisted that these territorial domains were disjoint and
mutually exclusive, and having accepted these conditions as the constitutive
bases of international society, what means were left to the new territorial rulers
for dealing with problems of that society that could not be reduced to territorial
solution?
This issue arose in connection with common spaces, such as contiguous and
transborder waterways as well as the oceans: how does one possess something
one does not own? And, still more problematic, how does one exclude others
from it? Inland waterways could be split down the middle and typically were,
though often not until other and more violent means had been exhausted.
Ocean space beyond defendable coastal areas posed a more substantial
problem. Spain and Portugal tried a bilateral deal whereby Spain claimed a
monopoly of western ocean trade routes to the Far East and Portugal the
eastern, but they failed to make their deal stick. At the request of the Dutch
East India Company, a young lawyer by the name of Hugo Grotius launched a
distinguished career by penning a pamphlet entitled, and proclaiming the
contrary doctrine of, Mare Liberum, which did stick.117
The really serious problem arose not in the commons, however, but right in
the heart of the mutually exclusive territorial state formations: no space was
left within which to anchor even so basic a task as the conduct of diplomatic
representation without fear of relentless disturbance, arbitrary interference,
and severed lines of communication.
In medieval Europe, the right of embassy was a method of formal and
privileged communication that could be admitted or denied depending upon
the social status and roles of the parties involved and the business at hand.118
Ambassadors had specific missions, for which they enjoyed specific immunities.
For a variety of misdeeds and crimes, however, ambassadors were tried and
sentenced by the prince to whom they were accredited, as though they were a
117. Grotius's immediate aim was to establish the principle of freedom to conduct trade on the
seas, but in order to establish that principle he had first to formulate some doctrine regarding the
medium through which ships passed as they engaged in long-distance trade. The principle he
enunciated, and which states came to adopt, defined an oceans regime in two parts: a territorial sea
under exclusive state control, which custom set at three miles because that was the range of
land-based cannons at the time, and the open seas beyond, available for common use but owned by
none. See Aster Institute, International Law: The Grotian Heritage (The Hague: Aster Institute,
1985).
118. The following discussion is based on Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy. Note Mattingly's
summary of medieval practice, and contrast it with what we know to be the case for the modern
world: "Kings made treaties with their own vassals and with the vassals of their neighbors. They
received embassies from their own subjects and from the subjects of other princes, and sometimes
sent agents who were in fact ambassadors in return. Subject cities negotiated with one another
without reference to their respective sovereigns. Such behavior might arouse specific objection, but
never on general grounds" (p. 23).
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Territoriality 165
subject of that prince. This solution ceased to be acceptable, however, once the
right of embassy became a sign of sovereign recognition and ambassadors were
in place permanently. The short-term response was to grant more and more
specific immunities to resident ambassadors as the situation demanded. During
the century or so of religious strife, however, that option too came to be
undermined by, among other factors, the so-called embassy chapel question.
As the term implies, this had to do with the services celebrated in an
ambassador's chapel, at which compatriots were welcome, when the religions
of the home and host sovereigns differed. For example, Edward VI insisted that
the new English prayer book be used in all his embassies; Charles V would
tolerate no such heresy at his court. It was not uncommon for diplomatic
relations to be broken over the issue in the short run. In the long run, however,
that proved too costly a solution; the need for continuous and reliable
communication among rulers was too great. A doctrinal solution was found
instead. Rather than contemplate the heresy of a Protestant service at a
Catholic court and vice versa, it proved easier to pretend that the service was
not taking place in the host country at all but on the soil of the homeland of the
ambassador. And so it gradually became with other dimensions of the activities
and precincts of embassy. A fictitious space, designated "extraterritoriality,"
was invented. Mattingly has put the paradox well: "By arrogating to themselves
supreme power over men's consciences, the new states had achieved absolute
sovereignty. Having done so, they found they could only communicate with one
another by tolerating within themselves little islands of alien sovereignty."119
These islands of alien sovereignty were seen, Adda Bozeman adds, "not only as
the foreign arm of each separate government, but also as the nucleus of the
collective system of ... states ... outside of which no sovereign could
survive."'20
What we might call an "unbundling" of territoriality (of which the doctrine
of extraterritoriality was the first and most enduring instantiation) over time
has become a generic contrivance used by states to attenuate the paradox of
absolute individuation.2l Various types of functional regimes, common markets,
political communities, and the like constitute additional forms whereby
territoriality has become unbundled. Thus, in the modern international polity
an institutional negation of exclusive territoriality serves as the means of
situating and dealing with those dimensions of collective existence that
territorial rulers recognize to be irreducibly transterritorial in character.
Nonterritorial functional space is the place wherein international society is
anchored.
119. Ibid, p. 244. See also Adda B. Bozeman, Politics and Culture in International History
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 479-80.
120. Bozeman, Politics and Culture in Intemational History, pp. 482-83.
121. I adapt this notion from the discussion of unbundling sovereign rights in Kratochwil, "Of
Systems, Boundaries and Territoriality."
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166 International Organization
Patterns of change
Mattingly, in his magisterial study, acknowledges that "the taproots of the
modern state may be followed as far back as one likes in Western history [even]
to the cities of antiquity whereof the hazy images continued to provide some
statesmen in every medieval century with an ideal model of authority and
order."'122 But, he shows persuasively, the modern state did not evolve from
these earlier experiences; rather, it was invented by the early modern Europeans.
Indeed, it was invented by them twice, once in the leading cities of the
Italian Renaissance and once again in the kingdoms north of the Alps
sometime thereafter. This suggests a final issue for consideration: the patterns
exhibited by epochal change. Three are indicated by the medieval-to-modern
transformation.
First, unanticipated consequences played a major role in determining the
ultimate outcomes of long-term changes. The Crusades were not designed to
suggest new modes of raising revenues for territorial rulers, but they ended up
doing so.123 The modern state was not logically entailed in the medieval papacy;
yet, according to Strayer, by the example of effective administration it set, "the
Gregorian concept of the Church almost demanded the invention of the
concept of the State."'124 Society did not vote for capitalism when it endorsed
the civilizing impulses of commerce; but the bourgeoisie, the social carriers of
commerce, embodied it. Later, monarchs did not set out to weaken their
constitutional powers by selling offices or convening assemblies to raise taxes;
they sought only to increase their revenues.125 In short, the reasons for which
things were done often had very little to do with what actually ended up being
done or what was made possible by those deeds.126
Second, fundamental transformation may have had long-standing sources,
but when it came, it came quickly by historical standards. Moreover, it came
amid crisis and disintegration of the previous order-amid a generalized loss of
predictability and understanding of, in Tracy Strong's words, "what might
122. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, pp. 105-6.
123. Ronald C. Finucane, Soldiers of the Faith (New York: St. Martin's, 1983).
124. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modem State, p. 22.
125. North and Weingast demonstrate this very nicely, both formally and empirically, in the case
of seventeenth-century England-except for the overall logic they attribute to the process, which
"interprets the institutional changes on the basis of the goals of the winners." See Douglass C.
North and Barry R. Weingast, "Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions
Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-century England," Journal of Economic History 49
(December 1989), p. 803, emphasis added. The problem with their interpretation is that the goals
of the losers-the insatiable quest for revenues on the part of rulers-not of the winners, drove the
process that ultimately made possible the imposition of constitutional constraints on the
prerogatives of monarchs.
126. Discussing a biological parallel, Stephen Jay Gould contends that avian limbs became
useful for flying once they were fully developed into wings, but they probably evolved for so
commonplace a purpose as keeping birds warm. See Gould, "Not Necessarily Wings," Natural
History 10/85.
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Territoriality 167
count as politics, of what counts as evidence and what as fact, and of what is
contentious and what might appear secure.'127 Once the system of modern
states was consolidated, however, the process of fundamental transformation
ceased: "[states] have all remained recognizably of the same species up to our
own time," Tilly concludes, though their substantive forms and individual
trajectories of course have differed substantially over time.'28 Paleontologists
describe this pattern of change-stable structures, rupture, new stable structures-as
"punctuated equilibrium."'129
Finally, change has never been complete or all-encompassing. As Spruyt
makes clear, the medieval system of rule in the first instance was succeeded by
several viable forms of territorial governance: large-scale territorial states,
city-states, and city-leagues. And the process that ultimately selected out the
territorial state embodied a different logic than the process that produced both
the state and its alternative forms.130 Moreover, keep in mind that the formal
demise of the Holy Roman Empire (1806)-a relic of medievaldom that
historians insist never was holy, nor Roman, nor an empire-actually is closer
in time to the birth of the European Community (EC) than to the Peace of
Westphalia, the usual marker of the inception of modern international
relations. Finally, sociopolitical collectivities of very long historical standing
remain vital today without being contained in territorial states.13' In short, the
coexistence of different historical forms is not unusual. Designating dominant
historical forms, therefore, is a matter of balance: of judging ascendancy and
decline, relevance and spurious signification. Nonetheless, it is the case that the
modern state has succeeded in driving out substitutable alternatives more
effectively than any other prior form.
127. Strong, "Dramaturgical Discourse and Political Enactments," p. 245.
128. Tilly, "Reflections on the History of European State-making" p. 31. For a suggestive
typology of different substantive state forms, see Michael Mann, States, War, and Capitalism (New
York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), chap. 1.
129. See Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall, The Myths of Human Evolution (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982). Eldredge, in a personal conversation, attributed the basic insight
for the punctuated equilibrium model to the historian Frederick Teggart-which is ironic in the
light of the influence that the Darwinian model of human evolution has had on social thinking,
including historiography! See Frederick J. Teggart, Theory of History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1925). Bock has described large-scale social change in similar terms: "In place of
a continuous process of sociocultural change, the records clearly indicate long periods of relative
inactivity among peoples, punctuated by occasional spurts of action. Rather than slow and gradual
change, significant alterations in peoples' experiences have appeared suddenly, moved swiftly, and
stopped abruptly"; see Kenneth Bock, Human Nature and History: A Response to Sociobiology (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 165. Excellent discussions of punctuated equilibrium
and path dependency in the origins of the modern state may be found in two articles by Stephen D.
Krasner: "Approaches to the State: Alternative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics," Comparative
Politics 16 (January 1984), pp. 223-46; and "Sovereignty: An Institutional Perspective,"
Comparative Political Studies 21 (April 1988), pp. 66-94.
130. See Spruyt, "The Sovereign State and its Competitors."
131. The so-called Arab nation is a case in point; see Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab
Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1991).
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168 International Organization
Historicizing postmodernity
At the close of the fifteenth century, Europe stood poised to reach out to and
then conquer the globe. By the beginning of the twentieth century, this
"Columbian epoch," as Sir Halford Mackinder characterized it in 1904, was
coming to an end.132 In his seminal essay, Mackinder addressed two distinct
dimensions of the new "global" epoch. The first has attracted the most
attention but is the less important for present concerns: the strategic consequences
of the essential unity of the world's oceans, which gave rise to the great
heartland/rimland and land-power/sea-power debates that became the stuff of
geopolitics, right down to the postwar theory of containment. The second,
which subsequent commentators have largely ignored, concerned the spatial
and temporal implosion of the globe: the integration of separate and coexisting
world systems, each enjoying a relatively autonomous social facticity and
expressing its own laws of historicity, into a singular post-Columbian world
system.133
In this essay, I have looked for a vocabulary and the dimensions of analysis
that would allow us to ask sensible questions about possible postmodern
tendencies in the world polity. I have done so by unpacking the process
whereby the most distinct feature of modernity in international politics came to
be: a particular form of territoriality-disjoint, fixed, and mutually exclusive-as
the basis for organizing political life. In conclusion, I summarize
briefly the main findings of this endeavor and point toward some methodological
as well as substantive implications for future research.
To summarize, the concept of differentiation was the key that allowed us to
uncover the historically specific and salient characteristics of modern territoriality.
Accepting that the international polity, by definition, is an anarchy, that
is, a segmented realm, on what basis is it segmented? On what basis are its units
individuated? What drove the peculiarly modern form of individuation? And
what were its implications for the international collectivity? The mode of
differentiation within any collectivity, I suggested, is nothing less than the
central focus of the epochal study of rule.
The modern mode of differentiation resulted from changes in several
domains of social life, which are irreducible to one another. These domains
included material environments (ecodemographics, relations of production,
relations of force); the matrix of constraints and opportunities within which
social actors interacted (the structure of property rights, divergences between
132. See H. J. Mackinder, "The Geographical Pivot of History," Geographical Joumal 23 (April
1904).
133. As Mackinder predicted, "Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a
surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far
side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be
shattered in consequence." See ibid, p. 421.
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Territoriality 169
private and social rates of return, coalitional possibilities among major social
actors); and social epistemes (political doctrines, political metaphysics, spatial
constructs). Each was undergoing change in accordance with its own endogenous
logic. But these changes also interacted, sometimes sequentially, sometimes
functionally, sometimes simply via the mechanism of diffusion, that is, of
conscious and unconscious borrowing. Whereas individual strands of change
can be traced back almost at will, at a certain point the new forms crystallized
fairly quickly and shaped all subsequent developments.
The domain of social epistemes, the mental equipment by means of which
people reimagined their collective existence, played a critical role.134 The
specificity of modern territoriality is closely linked to the specificity of
single-point perspective. Social epistemes did not, however, act as some
ethereal Zeitgeist but through specific social carriers and practices. Social
epistemes affected outcomes via the mechanisms of social empowerment and
delegitimation and by informing such doctrinal contrivances as extraterritoriality,
on which the society of territorial state formations came to rest.
Our case offers some methodological implications for the study of transformation
today. One methodological point follows directly from the relative
autonomy of the diverse domains wherein past change occurred. Clearly,
different bodies of contemporary international relations theory are better
equipped to elucidate different domains of contemporary change and continuity.
Neorealism is very good on the endogenous logics of the relations of force,
but it is even more reductionist than most modern Marxisms when it comes to
appreciating the role of social epistemology. The microeconomics of institutions
provides great insight into strategic behavior, but it is silent on the origins
of the social preferences that give it substantive meaning. Cultural theories are
virtually alone in addressing the role of spatial imageries, but typically they
neglect the effect of micromotives, and so on. Each, therefore, can become a
"grand theory" only by discounting or ignoring altogether the integrity of those
domains of social life that its premises do not encompass. Nor are the various
bodies of extant theory in any sense additive, so that we could arrive at a grand
theory by steps. In short, while there may be law-like generalizations in the
medieval-to-modern transformation, there are none of it. Accordingly, understanding
that transformation-and presumably any analogous shift that may be
taking place today-requires an epistemological posture that is quite different
from the imperious claims of most current bodies of international relations
theory. It requires, as Quentin Skinner characterizes it, "a willingness to
emphasize the local and the contingent, a desire to underline the extent to
which our own concepts and attitude have been shaped by particular historical
134. There is no adequate English translation of Duby's notion l'imaginaire sociale, which I draw
on here; his translator renders it as "collective imaginings." See Duby, The Three Orders, p. vii.
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170 International Organization
circumstances, and a correspondingly strong dislike ... of all overarching
theories and singular schemes of explanation."'135
A second methodological point follows directly from the first. If it is true that
the intellectual apparatus by which we study fundamental change is itself
implicated in a world that may be changing, how valid and viable is that
intellectual quest to begin with? This is particularly vexing in attempts to
understand the prospects of postmodernity, insofar as prevailing scientific
approaches are part and parcel of the very definition of modernity.136 Not being
a philosopher of science, my answer perforce remains somewhat unschooled.
Nevertheless, I find fault with the postmodernist epistemologues and the
dominant positivists alike.
For the postmodernists, modern scientific method represents either force or
farce. In its stead, they retreat into a fettishistic parent(he[re]tical) obscurantism
that they impute to poststructuralist/postmodernist method.137 But
their "move"-to borrow one of their "privileged" terms-is deeply misguided,
as a simple example will show. In discussions of cultural transformations
toward postmodern forms, few insights are accorded greater significance than
Einstein's theories of relativity. This is because relativity shattered one of the
fixed and even absolute pillars of modernist thought by revolutionizing human
understanding of space and time. Yet Einstein's theories were soon confirmed:
the special theory by laboratory experiments and the general theory during the
eclipse of 1919, all in accordance with fairly straightforward scientific methods.
What Einstein did was to formulate an entirely new and different ontology of
the physical world. Indeed, he never even accepted the implications for
epistemology that others drew from his work, as illustrated by his often-cited
rejoinder to the uncertainty principle, that God does not play dice with the
universe. Hence, it is entirely possible to say things of importance about
postmodernity, and even to have contributed to the historical condition of
postmodernity, without degenerating into what passes for postmodernist
method.
As for the dominant positivist posture in our field, it is reposed in deep
Newtonian slumber wherein method rules, epistemology is often confused with
method, and the term "ontology" typically draws either blank stares or
bemused smiles. I choose the Newtonian analogy deliberately and with care.
Gerald Feinberg's depiction helps to show why it is useful: "Newtonian
mechanics by itself did not attempt to explain what forces might exist in nature,
but rather described how motion occurred when the force was known. "138
135. Quentin Skinner, The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 12.
136. For a superb discussion of these issues, see Seyla Benhabib, "Epistemologies of Postmodernism:
A Rejoinder to Jean-Francois Lyotard," New German Critique 33 (Fall 1984), pp. 103-26.
137. For examples, consult the extensive bibliography in Pauline Rosenau, "Once Again into the
Fray."
138. Gerald Feinberg, What is the World Made Of pAtoms, Leptons, Quarks, and Other Tantalizing
Particles (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1978), p. 9, emphasis added.
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Territoriality 171
Merely by substituting "structures" or "preferences" for "forces" in that
sentence, one obtains an apt rendering of prevailing international relations
theories today.139 They describe how "motion" occurs-given a set of struct
or preferences. Accordingly, these theories cannot, ontologically, apprehend
fundamental transformation, for the issue of "what forces [structures/
preferences] might exist in nature" is precisely what the study of transformation
is all about.140
Our examination of the emergence of modern territoriality also has
substantive implications for the study of potential transformation in the
international system today. A full application of the historically grounded
conceptual framework sketched out here is well beyond the scope of this
article. Nevertheless, I close with an overall analytical lead, as well as some
working hypotheses about each of the illustrative cases with which I began.
The preceding analysis suggests that the unbundling of territoriality is a
productive venue for the exploration of contemporary international transformation.
Historically, as we have seen, this is the institutional means through which
the collectivity of sovereigns has sought to compensate for the "social defects"
that inhere in the modern construct of territoriality.14' This negation of the
exclusive territorial form has been the locale in which international sociality
throughout the modern era has been embedded. The terrain of unbundled
territoriality, therefore, is the place wherein a rearticulation of international
political space would be occurring today.
Take first the EC, in which the process of unbundling territoriality has gone
further than anywhere else. Neorealism ascribes its origins to strategic
bipolarity; microeconomic institutionalism examines how the national interests
and policy preferences of the major European states are reflected in patterns of
EC collaboration; and neofunctionalism anticipated the emergence of a
supranational statism. Each contains a partial truth. From the vantage of the
139. Using Kratochwil's typology, mainstream international relations theory traffics mostly in
"the world of brute facts," or the palpable here and now; it discounts "the world of intention and
meaning"; and it largely ignores altogether "the world of institutional facts." See Friedrich
Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chap. 1.
140. Structurationist theory is one recent attempt to formulate an ontology of international
relations that is predicated on the need to endogenize the origins of structures and preferences, if
transformation is to be understood. See Alexander Wendt, "The Agent-Structure Problem in
International Relations Theory," International Organization 41 (Summer 1987), pp. 335-70; David
Dessler, "What's at Stake in the Agent-Structure Debate?" International Organization 43 (Summer
1989), pp. 441-73; John Gerard Ruggie, "International Structure and International Transformation:
Space, Time, and Method," in Czempiel and Rosenau, Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges,
pp. 21-35; Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, "Institutions and International Order," in
ibid., pp. 51-73; and Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social
Construction of Power Politics," International Organization 46 (Spring 1992), pp. 391-425.
141. Once again, I have in mind a Lockean understanding, namely those "Inconveniences which
disorder Mens properties in the state of Nature," the avoidance of which is said to drive "Men [to]
unite into Societies." See Locke, Two Treatises of Government, sec. 2.136. These "social defects"
thus may be thought of as the generic form of international "collective action problems," of which
various types of externalities, public goods, and dilemmas of strategic interaction are but specific
manifestations.
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172 International Organization
present analysis, however, a very different attribute of the EC comes into view:
it may constitute the first "multiperspectival polity" to emerge since the advent
of the modern era. That is to say, it is increasingly difficult to visualize the
conduct of international politics among community members, and to a
considerable measure even domestic politics, as though it took place from a
starting point of twelve separate, single, fixed viewpoints. Nor can models of
strategic interaction do justice to this particular feature of the EC, since the
collectivity of members as a singularity, in addition to the central institutional
apparatus of the EC, has become party to the strategic interaction game. To
put it differently, the constitutive processes whereby each of the twelve defines
its own identity-and identities are logically prior to preferences-increasingly
endogenize the existence of the other eleven. Within this framework, European
leaders may be thought of as entrepreneurs of alternative political identities-EC
Commission President Delors, for example, is at this very moment
exploiting the tension between community widening and community deepening
so as to catalyze the further reimagining of European collective existence.142
There is no indication, however, that this reimagining will result in a federal
state of Europe-which would merely replicate on a larger scale the typical
modern political form.
The concept of multiperspectival institutional forms offers a lens through
which to view other possible instances of international transformation today.
Consider the global system of transnationalized microeconomic links. Perhaps
the best way to describe it, when seen from our vantage point, is that these links
have created a nonterritorial "region" in the world economy-a decentered yet
integrated space-of-flows, operating in real time, which exists alongside the
spaces-of-places that we call national economies. These conventional spaces-ofplaces
continue to engage in external economic relations with one another,
which we continue to call trade, foreign investment, and the like, and which are
more or less effectively mediated by the state. In the nonterritorial global
economic region, however, the conventional distinctions between internal and
external once again are exceedingly problematic, and any given state is but one
constraint in corporate global strategic calculations. This is the world in which
IBM is Japan's largest computer exporter, and Sony is the largest exporter of
television sets from the United States. It is the world in which Brothers
Industries, a Japanese concern assembling typewriters in Bartlett, Tennessee,
brings an antidumping case before the U.S. International Trade Commission
against Smith Corona, an American firm that imports typewriters into the
United States from its offshore facilities in Singapore and Indonesia. It is the
world in which even the U.S. Pentagon is baffled by the problem of how to
maintain the national identity of "its" defense-industrial base.143 This nonterri-
142. This process is by no means free of controversy or resistance, as a recent London front-page
headline ("Delors Plan to Rule Europe,") makes clear-but historical change never has been. See
Sunday Telegraph, 3 May 1992, p. 1.
143. At the time of writing, the Pentagon is considering, among other options, a "reconstitution"
model for the U.S. defense-industrial base, now that large and long-term procurement runs are
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Territoriality 173
torial global economic region is a world, in short, that is premised on what
Lattimore described as the "sovereign importance of movement," not of place.
The long-term significance of this region, much like that of the medieval trade
fairs, may reside in its novel behavioral and institutional forms and in the novel
space-time constructs that these forms embody, not in any direct challenge that
it poses as a potential substitute for the existing system of rule.
Consider also the transformative potential of global ecology. The human
environment is of central importance for future planetary politics from many
perspectives. Central among them is its potential to comprise a new and very
different social episteme-a new set of spatial, metaphysical, and doctrinal
constructs through which the visualization of collective existence on the planet
is shaped. This episteme would differ in form from modern territoriality and its
accoutrements insofar as the underlying structural premise of ecology is holism
and mutual dependence of parts. The difficulty is in tapping this social
epistemological dimension empirically. Nonetheless, it may be possible to infer
from state behavior whether and to what extent it is coming to express new and
different principles of international legitimacy, for example. The concept of
international custodianship is an obvious candidate for closer scrutiny. Under
it, no other agency competes with or attempts to substitute for the state, but the
state itself acts in a manner that expresses not merely its own interests and
preferences but also its role as the embodiment and enforcer of community
norms-a multiperspectival role, in short, somewhat in the manner of medieval
rulers vis-'a-vis cosmopolitan bodies of religion and law.'44 Another possible
approach is to examine the impact of real or simulated environmental
catastrophes on the thinking of policymakers and on the popular imagination at
large: Chernobyl, the Antarctic ozone hole, and global warming scenarios come
to mind.145
Finally, this analysis also potentially enriches the field of international
security studies. To cite but one example, despite the severe dislocations that
have accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union's East European empire
and then of the Soviet Union itself, no one in any position of authority
anywhere in Europe to date has advocated, or is quietly preparing for, a return
to a system of competitive bilateral alliances. Thus far, all of the options on the
table concerning the external mechanisms for achieving security in Europe,
unlikely to persist widely. It has proved extraordinarily difficult, however, to decide whether what
should be available for reconstitution should be defined by ownership, locale, commitment to the
economy, nationality of researchers, or what have you-the divergence between those indicators of
national identity being increasingly pronounced-and to determine whether, once defined, such
units will actually exist and be available for reconstitution when needed.
144. Allott considers several provisions of the maritime Exclusive Economic Zone to exhibit
"delegated powers," under which coastal states act "not only in the mystical composite personage
of the international legislator but also in performing the function of the executive branch of their
own self-government." See Philip Allott, "Power Sharing in the Law of the Sea," American Joumal
of Intemational Law 77 (January 1983), p. 24.
145. On the epistemic import of the Antarctic ozone hole, see Karen Therese Litfin, "Power and
Knowledge in International Environmental Politics: The Case of Stratospheric Ozone Depletion,"
Ph.D. diss., Department of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles, 1992.
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174 International Organization
East and West, have been multilateral in form.146 These mechanisms include
NATO reaching out institutionally to the EC via the West European Union on
one side; and, on the other side, to the East European states via the newly
created North Atlantic Cooperation Council, comprising the membership of
the two formerly adversarial alliances, as well as to the Conference on Security
and Cooperation in Europe.147 This development suggests a hypothesis for
further exploration. Within the industrialized world, and partially beyond, we
may be witnessing emerging fragments of international security communitiesalongside
the traditional war system that continues elsewhere. These security
communities are not integrated in the sense that the ill-fated European
Defense Community would have been, but they are more extensively institutionalized
than the "pluralistic security communities" of integration studies in the
1950s.148 Once more the term "multiperspectival" seems appropriate. Within
the scope of these security communities the imbalances of advantage that
animated positional wars throughout the modern era now are resolved by more
communitarian mechanisms instead. Such mechanisms do not imply the
abolition of the use of force; they do imply, however, that the use of force is
subject to greater collective legitimation.
It is truly astonishing that the concept of territoriality has been so little
studied by students of international politics; its neglect is akin to never looking
at the ground that one is walking on. I have argued that disjoint, mutually
exclusive, and fixed territoriality most distinctively defines modernity in
international politics and that changes in few other factors can so powerfully
transform the modern international polity. What is more, I have tried to show
that unbundled territoriality is a useful terrain for exploring the condition of
postmodernity in international politics, and I have suggested some ways in
which that might be done. The emergence of multiperspectival institutional
forms was identified as a key dimension in understanding the possibility of
postmodernity.
On reflection, though, the reason territoriality is taken for granted is not
hard to guess. Samuel Becket put it well in Endgame: "You're on earth, there's
no cure for that." Unbundled territoriality is not located some place else; but it
is becoming another place.
146. John Gerard Ruggie, "Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution," International
Organization 46 (Summer 1992), pp. 561-98. Waltz distinguishes between internal and external
balancing mechanisms in Theory of International Politics.
147. Based on personal interviews at NATO headquarters, Brussels, May 1992. Japan has
undertaken a slow but systematic process of its own to normalize its security relations by means of
multilateralization: through the postministeral conferences of the Association of South East
Nations, for example, as well as through the recent legistation permitting Japan to participate in
United Nations peacekeeping forces (based on personal interviews at the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, Tokyo, May 1992).
148. The classic study is Karl W. Deutsch et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957).
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