Regionalism, Geography, and the International Legal Imagination

Abstract Despite international law's identity as focused on spatial relations, it has long been dominated by a temporal, narrative imagination. This article argues for an increased spatial conception of international law, but one that is also culturally and temporally enriched. It begins with a section called "Regionalism without the Region," which describes how efforts at emphasizing the region in international law are often empty of regional content-that is, of true locality. Then, in a section on "Globalization without the Globe," the article describes how globalization studies have focused on globalization as a process-that is, on the "ization" rather than the "globe" and, consequently, the real geographical impact. Finally, in a section entitled, "Westphalia without the West," the article takes on the Westphalian myth and suggests that the Westphalian state system was never fully in place and if so only for the briefest of moments-even in its supposed epicenter. In sum, international law has adopted so strong a narrative mode that it is ultimately more interested in mapping than maps, losing sight of geographical specificity. I. INTRODUCTION: TlME FOR SPACE We might assume that international law, being international law, is fundamentally about geography. Is it not largely about how the world is carved up into geographical units? We might think not only of the list of International Court of Justice cases about borders, arbitration decisions over the path of waters that turn to seemingly arcane concepts like the thalweg, and all those discourses about the reach of territorial waters; but we might also think of acts of war, the international trade regime, and the Law of the Sea. Is not international law ultimately about who possesses what territory and who can do what where? Although that is what one might assume, I would argue that there has long been a strong temporal, narrative tradition in the discipline of international law that has captured the international legal imagination. Roscoe Pound was right when, in a lecture published in the first issue of the Bibliotheca Visseriana in 1923, he argued that modern scholarship about international law is distinct from older international law theories because its intellectual foundation is historical rather than philosophical.1 And Edward Gallaudet began his Manual of International Law by asserting that "[t]he student of international law being at the same time a student of history, the attention of the reader must first be directed to the leading events which have suggested and developed the law of nations."2 One of the signs of the temporal orientation of the international legal imagination is the long tradition of textbooks in international law beginning with the history of the discipline, whether extending over the forty pages that H.W. Halleck devoted to the "History of International Law" at the start of his International Taw or J. L. Brierly's forty-page chapter on "The Origins of International Law" that begins his own classic The Taw of Nations? And Antonio Cassese's recent international law textbook starts with a five-chapter Part I devoted to the "Origins and Foundations of the International Community."4 Occasionally, scholars of international law acknowledge the role that the temporal and the narrative plays in informing the international legal imagination even if one rarely finds the selfconsciousness about this fact of the 2007 collection of essays, Time, History and International Law.5 Despite this temporality, there have recentiy been important voices calling for an emphasis on geography in law, as exemplified by the essays collected in The Tegal Geographies Reader in 2001, where the editors asserted that "[i]f social reality is shaped by and understood (or constituted) in terms of the legal, it is also shaped by and understood in terms of space and place."6 Specifically, within international law, Hari M. Osofsky - trained as a geographer as well as a lawyer - has called for a geographical approach to international law. …