The first
historical manifestation of international society was in grace. It comprised a large number of city
states. Geographically located at
the lower Balkan peninsula the Adriatic
and the Aegean seas.
They had a
common language, ancestry, religion and way of life which distinguished them
from those of their neighbours whom they called barbarians. That is those who
did not speak Greek or Latin. Sparta,
Corinth and Athens were Greek city-states but Athens was the most popular. They constituted the first international
society in Western history. It is
important to state that Greece was
not a state. The society
consisted of city-states which were
for all intents and purpose
independent of each other.
The city –state
maintained relations but the identities of each was preserved through
ceremonies, cults, oracles, but political arrangements were the same.
The city-states consulted the oracles at
Delphi in resolving anything in dispute. They equally
evolved such special political vocabularies as reconciliation, truce, alliance peace, etc.
they did not establish resident diplomatic institutions. That were an invention
of Italian renaissance. The ancient
Greeks did not articulate international
law because they could not
conceive of the city states as having
rights and duties in relation to
other city-states.5 The
ancient Greek city states were politically self contained,
their international society
was cultural/.religious rather
than legal / political.5
Though
the ancient Greeks did not conceive
international law in practical terms, they
nevertheless recognized that
certain principles ordained by the
gods or dictated by practical reality
should govern the conduct of relations between the city-states.
The ancient
Greeks constructed an international society which survived in the face of
hegemonic empires like Persia, Rome and
Macedonia. The first modern international society based on large-scale
territorial states came into existence a little later in north western
Europe out of which the global
international society has evolved.