"What will matter in this book is what both compliance with and violation of the norm reveal about how it constructs international legal reality, a reality constantly articulated through international legal argumentation. In that respect, it is posited that the rule of non- intervention matters less because it is demonstrably respected than because it is a constitutive legal rule, one which tells us how the 'game' of international law is supposed to be played. The norm, if nothing else, shapes the world we live in and, in that respect at least, international law is a self- fulfilling prophecy whose constructive incidence largely precedes and even relativizes its violations. One does not begin to understand the reality of international law until one takes the full measure of its 'world- making' character, namely the power of its inter- subjective understandings about the very conditions under which breaches might occur (rather than just the existence of such breaches or what to do about them). Specifically, interference is a 'constitutive' claim because it builds a world in which something known as interference can matter and exist. To put it differently, the idea of interference would not exist but for international law and the way it already posits that there is such a thing as sovereignty. Interference provides a label to structure unrelated factoids into a plausible legal claim. We would not know interference as 'interference'- at least the interference we know, as we know it- were it not for international law.
