Who’s in and who’s out: The international community as a de-legitimization device

The concept of the international community is widely used by scholars, practitioners and international political leaders and is an integral part of the common international vocabulary. In its essence it epitomizes that idea that states can hold common values and standards of conduct - namely that states can convene and take part in a collective “We” of states. The concept is used in day-to-day international politics as means to legitimize or delegitimize political behavior, suggesting that states not only discern a community of states at the international level, but also calculate and frame their actions in light of it. The tendency of states to, individually and collectively, portray themselves as an international community and judge their fellow states’ based on their conduct in the framework of the international community stands in the core of this paper. Taking a socio-discursive approach, the underlying premise is that the international community is essentially a discursive construct. It does not exist beyond the discursive level, as it materializes only once political agents talk about it, refer to it and attribute to it certain values, rules and virtues. This discursive construction essentially defines not only who’s in and who’s out of the international community, but also points to the normative and practical standards upon which a member’s conduct will be framed as legitimate or not. In this respect, the international community is both notional and practical. At the notional level, it is constituted and sustained by the acknowledgment of various social actors that attribute it with a certain (but dynamic) array of international norms and practices or at least demarcate and set the framework of legitimate and rightful conduct. At the practical level, it may inform states’ conduct in the international realm and further serves as a (de-)legitimizing device used by political leaders and practitioners in international discourse in order to claim legitimacy or render other’s actions as illegitimate. In this paper, I suggest exploring the ways through which states, refer and narrate – namely talk about – who’s in and who’s out the international community. The main textual corpus for this research is an original database of the annual speeches of heads of states at the general debate of the UN (1992-2014; n=4,264 texts) that represents the array of voices that comprise the international community. By applying methods of automated computerized text analysis, the paper surveys and maps states’ tendencies to discursively refer to the international community as means to demarcate its members (and non-members). It further suggests a comprehensive purview on both the types of targeted and targeting states as well as on the contexts in which, the international community – as a reference point – is being used to render states’ actions as legitimate or illegitimate.