The Sky Above the Treaty: Cultural Pluralism and the Interpretation of International Space Law

This article orbits on a hermeneutic question that the current politicisation of outer space has left largely unexplored: what cosmology lies hidden within the words with which international space law defines its own universality. Although it is commonly accepted that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty speaks on behalf of and for the benefit of all humanity, the question is whether these notions, which hinge on that of the ‘common heritage’, are semantically neutral vessels awaiting filling by any culture, or whether they already embody, in their very structure, the cosmology of a particular civilisational stance. The answer proposed here is negative as regards neutrality, since, by reading Articles I and II of the 1967 Treaty alongside the interpretative framework of Article 31 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, the essay demonstrates that the ‘ordinary meaning’ invoked by the latter is always the sedimented residue of a Cartesian separation between the knowing subject and the cosmic object, of a Lockean logic of appropriation through labour, of a Kantian universalism that abstracts humanity from any concrete community, and of a persistent treatment of space as an empty res nullius, open to the enterprise of whoever arrives there first, and never a genuine ‘cosmological zero’. Four cosmological frameworks—indigenous, Islamic, Confucian and Ubuntu—are therefore set against this hidden and obscured cosmology to demonstrate that ‘mankind’, ‘benefit’ and ‘common heritage’ are essentially contested concepts, and that the interpretative techniques ordinarily employed to resolve such disputes—systemic interpretation, the evolutionary method, and recourse to the travaux préparatoires—contribute to masking the cosmological conflict rather than resolving it. Rather than treating this dispute as a pathology to be cured by a return to a more authentic and attributive meaning of ‘mankind’, the essay draws on an agentive-generative theory of legal translation, developed elsewhere in relation to human dignity, to redefine cosmological pluralism as the very condition of possibility for a jurisgenerative interpretation of space treaties, one that never lapses into a merely jurispathic reading. On this basis, the paper concludes with a proposal de lege ferenda structured on three levels: the recognition of the contested nature of the Treaty’s founding concepts, a permanent advisory body on cultural and cosmological diversity within Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, and a ‘cosmological’ margin of appreciation, modelled on the doctrine developed by the European Court of Human Rights whilst remaining distinct from it, aimed at making the interpretation of space law a genuine dialogue between cosmologies.