Abstract

The idea stressed in this article is that, in the international context, the traditional identity of states is today becoming more economic than political. This is due to the situation of continuous contractualization in which states are involved as partners of international organizations: in contractual exchanges, they are forced to be loyal to each other more than they were in the past and transaction costs are reduced. This is all the more true because of the "multilateral" character of international organizations, so that states act under reciprocal ties, while theoretical economic approaches like "game theory" are currently used in the literature, through the "contractual states" the grammar of international power is changing and preparing new ways to read the world.