From Ocean Dynamics to Plural Normative Orders Stratification, Localised Mixing, and the Governance of Interfaces: A Preliminary Discussion with Multilingual Democracy and International Organisations as Cases

Abstract

A polity holding several orders of value contains parties whose claims are checkable on different time scales and by different observers, and arrangements of that kind are commonly assessed by measures computed on the whole. This paper takes the ocean as a worked case of a system whose state depends on two constituents transported at rates separated by two orders of magnitude, and carries six results from it into the analysis of plural normative orders. Each constituent carries an evolution equation and the governing quantity carries none, so an aggregate description has no dynamics of its own. Processes of many kinds enter such a system through four channels, of which one fixes a coefficient and thereby alters the rule of evolution. Advancing the parts separately introduces an order of application, an interval between exchanges, and an operator carrying a flux across the interface, and two computed cases give a separation of 62 per cent of the peak anomaly from sequence alone and a transfer that reproduces the shape of a field while removing part of its integral. A combination of two admissible constituents may occupy a state below both, since the map to the governing quantity is nonlinear. A configuration stable by that quantity may be unstable in its constituents, so an aggregate measure returns a verdict on a condition it has not examined. And plurality may be a maintained condition, with passage across it paid from a separate budget converted at a small part of the area, so that absence of a centre and uniformity of function come apart. Carried across under a stated discipline, these yield a description of an international organisation as a site converting a flow already present into passage across an interface, and they hold apart the decentring of an arrangement and its dissolution. The results are entered as constraints upon the assessment of such arrangements, with the standing of a site conditioned on the capacity of those whose orders it converts to reopen its terms.