III. Conclusion

The norms and surveillance apparatus that arise resemble legal instruments by the regulatory function they are assigned to and which they perform more or less effectively, but radically differ from those instruments by the forms and means used. Those norms and devices are still very little known and very poorly understood. There is no doubt that the work and research that I have attempted to summarize here are still in their early stages. For a long time, we will stay confined to feeling our way along the various field studies of global law before being able to understand its meaning and to control its mechanisms. Nevertheless, these prolegomena are encouraging. Indeed, in this chapter I have only managed to give a slight idea of the apparatus emerging in all sorts of areas. Yet their similarity allows some sense of a common pattern to which those various instruments belong. One may start to discern the still vague prospect of an elementary theory of global law. That theory will not rest upon an exhaustive inventory of its sources, nor on the construction of a coherent and complete system of rules. Rather, it will rest on the description of a finite number of simple elements, the combination of which would enable us to account for the large number of seemingly anarchic, incoherent, and arbitrary arrangements that reality confronts us with.