THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN STATE SYSTEM

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.