The Ship of Democracy

Abstract War, exile and democratic crisis organized the world-mind in the early 1940s around the transitive exigences of states. Political in origin, those trials also magnified the pressure points of international legal personality due to the disaggregation of territory, people and legitimate, being democratic, government. France presents the paradigm case worthy of attention for the unexpected recoding of the normative lines of state identity by the cultural internationalism of French scholars in exile. L’École Libre Hautes Etudes (l’ÉLHE) in New York stands out as the representative of a civic and cultural code of state identity framed by the cultural activism of esteemed intellectuals and contingent on ideas or rather, on the ideal of the free state. Their symbolic ship of democracy alerts internationalists to the aleatory meetings between different codes of statehood which disrupt, and might easily progress, the normative rules of state identity during crisis. Three such encounters matter now, anchoring this study about what happens to international law when democracy fails, for the recoding of legal standards by cultural agents of state: of rules of state recognition, of territorial sovereignty and of the meaning of legal internationalism after war.