This Article argues that the Gulf Crisis of 1990–91, the first major international crisis of the post-Cold War era, was a constitutive moment for international law. The Article examines the contests in the United Nations over the meaning of the Crisis and shows that these contests were also over the meaning of cooperation under international law in the “new world order.” The Article casts the Gulf Crisis itself as a moment of “worldmaking,” in which the United States refashioned foundational concepts like interdependence, sovereignty, and humanity in warfare and deployed them to suit a state-centered vision of international cooperation under hierarchy.

Over the last three decades, international lawyers and institutions have come to understand constitution-making as an accepted technique of international law and a means of delivering peace and security. In defending this technique from its critics, scholars have drawn on a particular tradition of constitution-making that understands constitutionalism as a lawful form of international action, realizable through a set of formal practices, and juridically distinct from material concerns. This Article explores the building of this tradition through the work of legal scholars within the United States in conversation with German and Jewish émigré scholars and argues that reimagining constitutionalism for the coming decades requires rethinking this separation between the juridical and the material, as well as asking what constitutionalism demands of the laws governing the global economy.