PRACTICE AND THEORY

Since the end of World War II we have been witnessing what in retrospect looks more and more like a revolutionary period of international history when sovereign statehood – the constitutive principle of international society – is subjected to major change. It is perhaps most evident in the remarkable role of the United Nations in fostering new sovereignties around the world. In this paper I argue that African states are juridical artifacts of a highly accommodating regime of international law and politics which is an expression of a twentieth-century anticolonial ideology of self-determination. This civil regime has important implications for international theory and particularly the renewed interest in sovereignty.

The discourse characteristic of sovereignty is jurisprudential rather than sociological: the language of rules rather than roles, prescribed norms instead of observed regularities. The study of sovereignty therefore involves us in legal theory, international law, and international institutions in the broadest meaning of these terms: what elsewhere I call the “civil science” approach to the study of politics. By “neoclassical international theory” I refer to what Hedley Bull describes as “theorizing that derives from philosophy, history, and law” or what Martin Wight calls “a tradition of speculation about relations between states”: the companion of “political theory.”

The constitutional tradition generally tends to assume, with Grotius, Burke, and Oakeshott as against Machiavelli, Kant, and Marx, that theory by and large is the child and not the parent of practice in political life.