From Ruins of Order to Practices of Solidarity: Reclaiming the International Community

by Anne Fock

Each time the world fractures – in war, in hunger, in flight – ¹ a familiar incantation rises: ‘the international community must act.’ It echoes through headlines and diplomatic halls, carrying the tone of moral urgency.

The notion of the ‘international community’ evokes the image of a global village built on responsibility shared beyond national borders – a collective united by a shared value system,
enshrined in the United Nations Charter as the constitution of the post-war international order: ‘We the Peoples of the United Nations [are] determined […] to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace […].’ Similar language justified the creation of the European Union, founded to ‘deepen the solidarity […and to create] an even closer union among the peoples of Europe’².

Today, the fragility of this international order as a foundation for a ‘good neighbourhood’ is more visible than ever. When war returns and belligerents are left unchecked, when States retreat into militarized territoriality, when humans are left to drown at borders, when climate commitments dissolve into empty symbolism, the ‘international community’ appears as the ghost of a world order, only summoned in times of rhetorical need. It evokes the question of who truly is there when the veil is lifted – and the fear that what lies beneath is only the spectral remnants of ideals, without a body to inhabit.

The Ghost of the International Community

If the ‘international community’ haunts our political imagination, it is worth asking what kind of creature it truly is, and understanding its harsh habitat between ideal and interest. Following sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies’ theory, ‘society’ (Gesellschaft) designates an artificially created construct forming around the individual purposes of its members, while ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft) designates a more organic structure based on shared values, trust, and mutual obligations;³ comparable to the image of a village or neighbourhood.

Among the established narratives, you may choose your fighter: the ‘shared vision of a better world for all people’⁴, the ‘dangerous reference point for the naïve’⁵, or the ‘club for the world’s wealthiest nations’⁶. Whichever lens you choose, it is clear that the current international order was not born as a pure ideal later betrayed by national interests; it has always been shaped by power dynamics and by the very imbalances it sought to overcome.

Realist and institutionalist thinkers see it as the society of States – a system of cooperation among sovereign actors rooted in mutual interests translating to law. More idealist or cosmopolitan perspectives imagine it as a community of peoples, bound not just by treaties but by common values such as peace, human rights, and responsibility for the Earth and all she contains; a vision which can be seen as reflected in international law by terms such as ius cogens and erga omnes obligations – legal notions that express universal values and fundamental rights and duties, many of which cannot be modified by States.

A Rhetoric of Power and Hope

It is the volatility of the term International Community that invites rhetorical instrumentalization⁷. While it implies that ‘all’ have spoken, in reality, it is never ‘all’ in the sense of ‘humankind’; not even in the sense of ‘all States’. Even in a realist reading reducing the term to a ‘society of States’, the claim of a collective will would be an overstatement. Instead, it typically translates to a coalition of States possessing the power to make their positions heard.

In political discourse, the expression is often treated as if it moves beyond this realist reading, instead describing a concrete and morally authoritative actor. This reification – the process of turning an abstract idea into something that appears real and tangible – lends the term an apparent substance that in reality it does not possess. The notion of ‘community’ loses any reference to a shared substance; it is far from describing a village, a neighbourhood, or an ecosystem. And while invoking morality, it defies it by calling for obedience to an abstract system.

Even more: the moral connotation of ‘community’ conceals the political reality of hierarchy. The international community thus becomes not only reduced to a rhetorical figure fulfilling a purely performative function; it also becomes a moral alibi: Much like a political deus ex machina, it resolves complex dilemmas by invoking a higher principle, allowing responsibility to be displaced rather than assumed. The effects of this rhetoric are tangible: Tony Blair’s ‘doctrine of the international community’ justified so-called humanitarian interventions in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq; similar discrepancies can be found on the EU level, such as in the European Union describing its border violence as an ‘effective system of solidarity and responsibility’.⁹

It is a paradox that the weaker the system sustaining the idea of the international community becomes, the more it is longed for: in moments of war, displacement, or ecological breakdown, the call to the international community becomes a spell of despair. When conflict-afflicted States or NGOs urge the international community to step in, it often is more than the attempt to shift responsibility to a supranational entity – it is the hope that the ‘international community’ has more to it than just the sum of national interests; that there is more under its veil than the spectral skeleton of imperial structures its protagonists. The ideals enshrined in the international order are real, but they are neither a self-fulfilling prophecy nor a priority over national interests. Community – if understood as an organic structure with its own intrinsic value – cannot be imposed, even by law.¹² One may call it a ‘body of law’, but it is not body enough for the ghost to become tangible.

Giving the Ghost a Body

Assuming that the international community is what the international world order sustained by States is built around, international law is the strongest attempt to give it a body. It promises a structure held up by norms and institutions, moving beyond the elusive spirit of the ideals it is supposed to embody. However, the ambiguities that unsettle the notion of the ‘international community’ reappear within the legal order meant to anchor it. Besides the obvious flaws of international law – fragmentation, lack of enforcement, indeterminacy, and neo-colonial inheritance – it also carries two opposing promises at once: to articulate universal ideals and to promote national interests; two weights pressing on already fragile shoulders.

The former diplomat and central figure in critical international legal theory, Martti Koskenniemi, describes this tension as an oscillation between apology and utopia – between justifying what States do anyway and projecting an illusion of morality¹⁰. This is not a contemporary crisis but a structural condition: International law was never a neutral framework waiting to be filled with universal meaning; even when speaking the language of solidarity, dignity, and equality, this proclaimed universalism struggles to exist within the tension created by these opposing intentions.

This has always been especially palpable for postcolonial and formerly colonized States. While the international legal order promises equal sovereignty, it is also a site of domination. Nevertheless, attempts to reanimate the body from within occur – though it is difficult to judge whether they reflect hope or simply a continuation of the familiar choreography of States. One such attempt is the Draft Declaration on the Right to International Solidarity, brought forward by the Group of 77, a coalition of 134 UN member States associated with the Global South. This initiative seeks to transform solidarity from rhetoric into a concrete right and promotes a transformation of the current international order to purge it of social and economic inequalities between States. While it remains stuck in the draft stage, largely due to a lack of support from Western States, the process has created ‘an intellectual space for world ordering from the margins’,¹¹ attempting to hold a system accountable that has often appropriated the language of solidarity while maintaining structures that undermine it.

Examples such as this show that there are initiatives that dare to change the fragile body from within, yet by doing so, they also reveal the struggle of confronting injustices that are bone-deep. This is not to say that international law has to be overcome at any cost – rather, it is a call to see it more realistically: as a project upholding a world order with States as its protagonists. The ideals enshrined in the international order are real, but they are neither a self-fulfilling prophecy nor a priority over national interests. Community – if understood as an organic structure with its own intrinsic value – cannot be imposed, even by law.¹² One may call it a ‘body of law’, but it is not body enough for the ghost to become tangible.

Giving the Ghost a Soul

If the international community seems absent where it is expected – or when invoked seems like a moral fiction or merely a tool to push forward an imperial agenda – it might be necessary to look elsewhere, and to consider the possibility that it might have been taking shape in places that lie outside the familiar architecture of the international world order. Moving beyond the institutionalist hope for salvation through stronger institutions, the (neo)liberal fixation on individual rights, or the postmodernist deconstruction of the hypocrisies of the international order, the idea of the international community must be reclaimed from below to give meaning to an otherwise empty promise. Especially in times when formal structures of cooperation and peace appear exhausted, the most hopeful expressions of internationalism emerge not from States but from civic action such as movements, networks, and communities, aiming for solidarity across borders in concrete ways. Hannah Arendt described this as the ‘space of appearance’¹³ – a public sphere that arises whenever people act and speak together, independent of any physical setting. Community, in this sense, is not a structure but a practice, taking shape between those who choose to relate rather than retreat. This is not a call to shift responsibility from governments to citizens, but to recognize the spaces where the meaning of the international community is actively being rebuilt.

Examples of this appear far beyond formal diplomacy. Civic actors enact forms of internationalism that no institution has managed to realize: International movements expressing justice and ecological claims, gatherings of indigenous people to protest the COP30, organizations such as such as SOS Méditerranée or Sea Watch refusing to watch the sea become a graveyard – by allowing for critical views and alternative world ordering,¹⁴ they exactly provide such a ‘space of appearance’.

But beyond that, such initiatives also broaden the meaning of ‘international community’ beyond the narrow confines through which States tend to interpret it; they move to close a widening solidarity gap that appears where States retreat behind their borders. In doing so, these movements do more than attempt to give the notion a soul – they also reveal its soullessness. Their practices expose the distance between official rhetoric and lived responsibility, and implicitly articulate a critique of the very actors who invoke the international community while eroding its substance. By acting where States hesitate, they challenge the ambiguity surrounding how much solidarity the ‘international community’ entails. Precisely because they occupy this uncertain terrain, their work is often precarious: subject to repression, criminalization, and the precarity that comes with stepping into spaces the State prefers to leave undefined.

The international community, in this sense, is not an entity waiting to be recovered; it is a lingering presence that can come into being wherever it is lived. In this understanding, it cannot be a unified spirit, but is closer to ‘a world where many worlds fit’ – following the expression coined by the Zapatistas un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos – creating space for the coexistence of narratives, cosmologies and multiple struggles.

Imagination as a Civil Skill

To reclaim internationalism also means reclaiming imagination. The collapse of the hope in the old ‘international order’ is not only institutional – it is imaginative. The belief that global justice as the foundation of the international community could be guaranteed through law and diplomacy once offered a fragile sense of direction, which seems to slip away. What remains is uncertainty, cynicism, and fatigue. Yet precisely in moments of disillusionment, imagination can become political: It is the first step for world ordering outside of the fractured body of the current world order.

Utopian thinking in that sense becomes more than a flight from reality; it becomes the act of envisioning what has not yet been lived, to make space for what could be. This imaginative work is indispensable because, as shown, the ‘international community’ is not a static value; it is a horizon that must be constantly re-envisioned. Without imagination, justice and solidarity turn into mere procedures. In public spaces, in civil movements, even in daily interactions in classrooms or book clubs, such imaginative work can be cultivated collectively. And it cannot be left only to those suffering the most under the current world order, but must also take root where geopolitical power is concentrated.

Many conversations which could lead to opening new vistas for world ordering end with a ‘but it is what we’ve got’, a ‘better than nothing’. Yet the conversation does not have to end there if imagination is allowed to intervene. Just like in the spirit world, the belief is the prerequisite for any appearance: Without the willingness to envision a different form of relation, the idea of the international community remains only an echo. Imagination might be just the path to gift the ghost both, a body and a soul.