International Community? What International Community?

The expression “international community” is ubiquitous in international legal instruments, government policies, jurisprudence and scholarship. Yet, its meaning, significance and repercussions in international law are still unclear. The departing point of the analysis is the horizontal or decentralized character of the international legal order, which lacks any authorities above States and has traditionally been the kingdom of bilateralism. In the second part of the XX Century, however, States moved beyond bilateralism and accepted the existence of obligations owned to the international community as a whole. The paper looks at such historical development from three different perspectives: (a) the definition(s) of “international community” in State practice and its possible identification with the United Nations; (b) the legal implications of the emergence in international jurisprudence and practice of obligations owned to the international community as a whole, as celebrated in the Barcelona Traction Case (1970); and (c) the rules governing international responsibility for breaches of those obligations, which were not completely defined in the International Law Commission’s Articles on State Responsibility (2001).