ABSTRACT
Speaking of community intuitively entails two distinct, yet related, connotations. First, community conjures up a positive feeling: ‘whatever the word “community” may mean, it is good “to have a community”, “to be in a community” ...Company or society can be bad; but not the community. Community, we feel, is always a good thing’ (Bauman 2001: 1). The positive connotation of safety and security, however, seems to work only on account of the implicit contrast with ‘an insecure world’.1 Both of these connotations are particularly visible in the everyday usage of the language of community in international life. Employed by practitioners and scholars alike, the language of community provides us with an inherently normative vocabulary, which enables us to speak of strong moral obligations in the present and provides us with a framework for normative change as a political project pointing towards the future. In the light of natural disasters or humanitarian emergencies the international community is called upon to lend their support to those in need. In turn, dissatisfaction with the capacities to provide such support leads to call for enhancing and further institutionalizing an international community capable of learning from past mistakes. Hence, getting a grasp on what constitutes a political community beyond the nation-state is a question which is by no means of purely scholarly interest.
