Spurs global follow on.

governmentality: Reconceptualizing the ‘rule of law’ as rule ‘through’ law," European Journal of

International Relations, vol. 18, no. 1, pg. 29-52, christian

To understand how the ‘rule of law’ topos has become associated with a singular emancipatory meaning, I argue, we need to appreciate how the American legal and constitutional project has contributed to what now seems a ubiquitous and transnational imperative; as, indeed, much of what is said about the ‘rule of law’ in IR and IL owes a great deal to the influence of American political and legal culture regarding the ideal conduct of domestic and international politics. How the American legal tradition becomes significant for contemporary understandings of the ‘rule of law’ in world affairs requires an appreciation of the imaginative force generated regarding law’s liberating effect from partial rule. This is hardly a novel observation, as both de Tocqueville5 and Paine heralded the uniqueness of America as the land where law, and not man, was ‘King’ (Paine, 1989: 28). As Kahn notes in his cultural study of American constitutionalism, it has been this dictum that has governed American legal thought and political imagination, as confirmed by the landmark United States Supreme Court decision in Marbury v. Madison: ‘The government of the United States has been emphatically termed a government of law, and not of men.’6

The extent to which the ‘rule of no one’ constitutes a statement of ‘fact’ versus an ‘aspiration’ for American legal and political life is indeed a point of contestation — be it regarding the present day or when Chief Justice Marshall presided over the Supreme Court. Yet, it is important to note that analytical scrutiny of the claim proves somewhat redundant. As Kahn rightly notes, regardless of the actual ‘truth’ of Marbury, generations of Americans and non-Americans have, through ‘aggregation of ideas, values and symbols’, come to believe and take for granted that, ‘[America] is a government of law and that through law the people rule’ (Kahn, 1997: 2). Flowing from this ‘collective’ belief, the ‘rule of law’ as the rule of ‘no one’ has been elaborated into a ‘rational’ model, constituting an ‘ideal of governance under rules that meet conditions of publicity, generality, coherence and nonretroactivity’ (Kahn, 1997: 3).