Imaginaries of International Society: Cross-Roads from ‘Rome’, ‘Serendippo’, and ‘Yalta’

To the extent that it infers ‘society’, international society is understood as the institutionalization of shared interests and norms. It arises as a result of phenomena, dynamics, and processes, across time and space. These are misunderstood partly because disciplinary science has occulted many. One of the factors leading to amnesia is the commonsense status currently held by Western canons in which the modern state and exclusive civilizational norms are identified as central identity and desire (or aspiration) of international society. This is particularly the case with the so-called English School. The problem is not merely that this school is perennially bound up in a post-imperial fantasy of inherent goodness of the West. It is also that it elides the fact that post-World War II imaginaries of power, interest, legality, legitimacy, and their terms and articulations are medieval in origin. My hunch is that even the received images of the Middle Ages are distorted in disciplinary canons. The paradox is that it would be impossible for the collective ‘us’ to properly project ourselves in the future without correcting the errors of disciplinary canons and their archives.

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